End Israeli War CrimesSunday, July 203:00 - 5:00 pmSan Francisco Ferry BuildingJoin
AROC - AYO and others in a symbolic funeral procession to honor the
Palestinian martyrs who were killed by the ongoing attacks by Israeli
Occupation Forces on Gaza.

Within the past couple weeks the
illegal, terrorist, and apartheid state of Israel and their military
have killed over 170 Palestinian, and thousands have been injured as the
Israeli government has bombed Gaza.

It is going to be a symbolic
procession that are similar to the funeral processions that happen in
the streets of Palestine for over 60+ years!

Religious and
community leaders will be invited to give prayers to honor those who
have passed as we mourn the ongoing killings and stand up against the
attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and occupied 1948
Palestine.

WE DEMAND THAT

The San Francisco Bay Area says no to Zionism! Stop US Aid to the Apartheid State of Israel! Free all our political prisoners! Support the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation!

Friends,Just in the past few weeks we have witnessed:​
**1000's of children being driven across the border by US devastation
of their homelands and then finding themselves caught between Homeland
Security rounds-ups and flag-waving racists​**The District Attorney in Santa Rosa California refusing to charge the cop who murdered 13-year old Andy Lopez​**2 videos that went viral showing cops brutally and unjustly beating Black womenAll
these and more outrages only serve to underscore more than ever the
need for powerful outpourings of resistance in October– as envisioned in
the Call for a Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police
Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation
(www.stopmassinceration.net) that was adopted at the meeting convened in
New York in April 2014.Should YOU be at this meeting?

Yes! If you live directly under these threats, this violence, this repression and want to STOP IT!Yes! Even If you don’t yourself live directly under it, but you know that it’s wrong and you want to STOP IT!

Let’s
all come together, individuals and organizations and make real plans so
this October, so our determination to end all this reverberates across
the country and around the world!October 2014 needs to be a full month of many diverse forms of resistance.

Saturday, Aug. 2, 1:00pmGather at the White HouseWashington, D.C.Transportation is being organized from all over the country

Yesterday,
Israeli Defense Forces deliberately targeted a group of children
playing soccer on a Gaza beach, killing four from the same family and
maiming the others—another war crime committed against the Palestinian
people.

Join thousands of people in a National March on the
White House on Saturday, August 2 at 1:00pm to condemn the Israeli
massacre in Gaza.

We have been in the streets every day in cities
around the country. What is needed now is a massive National March on
Washington.

Israel receives $4 billion in “aid” from the United
States each year. This money is being used to commit war crimes against
the Palestinian people in Gaza. We are demanding that all U.S aid to
Israel be ended now!

More than 200 people in Gaza have been
killed and more than 1,500 have been wounded from Israeli bombs and
missiles. This has to end!

Join us to demand:

Stop the massacre in Gaza! End the blockade of Gaza! End all U.S. aid to Israel!End the colonial occupation!Co-sponsors:
ANSWER Coalition; American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); American Muslim Alliance (AMA);
Al-Awda: Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Al-Awda: Palestine Right
to Return Coalition - New York; Code Pink; Muslim Legal Fund of America;
World Can't Wait; Partership for Civil Justice; MAS Immigrant Justice
Center; UNAC - United National Antiwar Coalition; Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA).

#2DC4Gaza #LetGazaLive #FreePalestine #Protest4Palestine

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The Free Palestine Movement asks for your help with this urgent need.

Call for Medical Doctors to Travel Immediately to Gaza

This
is a call for medical doctors who are willing and able to travel
immediately to Gaza to help treat Palestinians wounded in Israel's
latest assault on the besieged Strip. Your entry into Gaza will be
facilitated and help with the travel costs is also available. If you are
a medical doctor who is interested, please reply to this message.

The FPM Team

Free Palestine Movement: https://freepalestinemovement.org

Donations: https://freepalestinemovement.org/donate-2/

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B.
ARTICLES IN FULL

(Unless
otherwise noted)

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1) Israel Tells 100,000 Gazans to Flee; Both Sides Press Attacks
"A
Human Rights Watch report released on Wednesday cited United Nations
data showing that, as of Monday, more than three-quarters of the
Palestinians killed were civilians, including 36 children, and that
approximately 7,500 people had been displaced by the destruction of
1,255 homes. The Human Rights Watch report investigated four Israeli
strikes – on the Fun Time Beach cafe in the southern city of Khan
Younis; on a car carrying municipal workers in the Bureij refugee camp;
and two on homes where victims included a pregnant woman and small
children."

1) Israel Tells 100,000 Gazans to Flee; Both Sides Press Attacks
"A
Human Rights Watch report released on Wednesday cited United Nations
data showing that, as of Monday, more than three-quarters of the
Palestinians killed were civilians, including 36 children, and that
approximately 7,500 people had been displaced by the destruction of
1,255 homes. The Human Rights Watch report investigated four Israeli
strikes – on the Fun Time Beach cafe in the southern city of Khan
Younis; on a car carrying municipal workers in the Bureij refugee camp;
and two on homes where victims included a pregnant woman and small
children."

JERUSALEM
— Israel’s missile defense system intercepted four rockets over the Tel
Aviv area on Wednesday morning, after the military bombed the homes of
several political leaders of the militant Islamic movement Hamas
overnight and warned 100,000 residents of the Gaza Strip to evacuate
their homes by 8 a.m. ahead of more airstrikes.

The warnings, distributed by leaflets,
automated telephone calls and text messages, were the broadest yet and
advised people in northern towns as well as some neighborhoods of Gaza
City to head south. “The I.D.F. does not want to harm you, and your
families,” the leaflets said, using the abbreviation for the Israel
Defense Forces. “Whoever disregards these instructions and fails to
evacuate immediately endangers their own lives, as well as those of
their families,” the warning added.Israel said it had struck 39 targets
in Gaza overnight. Witnesses in Gaza said that a new, five-story
headquarters of the Interior Ministry was reduced to rubble and that the
strikes had also hit the homes of Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior Hamas
leader; Fathi Hamad, the movement’s former interior minister; Ismail
al-Ashqar, a member of the defunct Parliament; and Bassem Naim, an
adviser to the former prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniya.

“They
are key players in the decision-making of Hamas’s terrorist machine,”
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, said in an interview.

The renewed assault followed a six-hour pause
on Tuesday after Israel briefly accepted an Egyptian proposal to halt
the hostilities that began July 7. Hamas and other militant groups in
Gaza ignored or rejected the cease-fire initiative and launched more
than 125 rockets throughout Israel all day and night.

The
Palestinian death toll reached 201 on Wednesday, according to Gaza’s
Health Ministry, after a strike on a car in the southern town of Khan
Younis killed three. At least eight people were killed overnight, among
them a 5-year-old girl who fell from a high spot. A funeral was set for
Wednesday afternoon for Dror Khenin, 37, the first Israeli to die in the
nine-day conflict. A mortar shell killed him Tuesday night while he was
distributing food to soldiers near a border crossing into Gaza.

“I
call for securing the safety of the citizens of Israel,” said the
Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli radio reported. “To
the best of my understanding, it is not possible to ensure summer
vacation, a normal summer for our kids without a ground operation in
Gaza”

“We don’t need to rule Gaza, or build settlements in Gaza,”
he added. “We need to ensure that all Hamas terrorists run away, are
imprisoned or will die.”

Shortly after Mr. Lieberman made his
statement, he was forced to seek shelter while meeting with his
Norwegian counterpart, Borge Brende, in the city of Ashkelon, according
to Ynet, an online Israeli news outlet. After sirens sounded, Ynet
reported, a rocket exploded nearby.

The current escalation followed rising tension related to the June 12 abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers who were hitchhiking home from their schools in the occupied West Bank — Israel blamed Hamas for their deaths — and the July 2 kidnapping and killing of a 16-year-old Palestinian in East Jerusalem, which the Israeli authorities say was a revenge attack by extremist Jews.

President
Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, whose April reconciliation
with Hamas helped lead to the collapse of American-brokered peace talks
with Israel, was scheduled to meet on Wednesday with President Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt regarding the proposed cease-fire. Mr. Abbas
planned to travel to Turkey for similar talks on Friday.

It was
unclear how many Gazans were heeding the Israeli military’s call for
evacuations; Hamas has urged people to stay put, calling the warnings
“psychological warfare.” In the densely populated and poor neighborhoods
of Zeitoun and Shejaya in Gaza City, many people appeared confused,
with some seeking shelter in friends’ homes deeper inside the
neighborhoods rather than leaving.

“We don’t know where we’re
going, we’re going aimlessly,” said Mohammed Dalul, who was driving a
donkey cart with his six children and an elderly neighbor. They carried
only a canister of cooking gas and a single bag of clothes for the
children. “Nobody is looking after us,” said the neighbor, Naziha
Rukhneh.

The streets were emptier than normal, but a few children
flew kites and some men sat in the shade. Around noon, eight rockets
were launched simultaneously from nearby; a few minutes later, the sound
of a warplane was followed by that of a bomb dropping.

Ahmed
Salim said that he had ignored the general evacuation warning, though he
had heeded a personalized one three days ago when it was sent to his
brother’s cellphone; a strike hit the house 10 minutes later, said Mr.
Salim, who is now staying with a neighbor.

“All of it, the four stories, are flattened,” he said. “All I have is the clothes I am wearing.”

A
Human Rights Watch report released on Wednesday cited United Nations
data showing that, as of Monday, more than three-quarters of the
Palestinians killed were civilians, including 36 children, and that
approximately 7,500 people had been displaced by the destruction of
1,255 homes. The Human Rights Watch report investigated four Israeli
strikes – on the Fun Time Beach cafe in the southern city of Khan
Younis; on a car carrying municipal workers in the Bureij refugee camp;
and two on homes where victims included a pregnant woman and small
children.

“Israel’s rhetoric is all about precision attacks, but
attacks with no military target and many civilian deaths can hardly be
considered precise,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director of
Human Rights Watch, said in the report. “Recent documented cases in Gaza
sadly fit Israel’s long record of unlawful airstrikes with high
civilian casualties.”

The report also criticized Israel’s tactic
of warning residents to evacuate, saying it “does not make an otherwise
unlawful attack lawful.”

Asked about the report, Colonel Lerner
said Human Rights Watch was “ignoring the fact that Hamas is deeply
embedded in an underground Gaza Strip,” referring to tunnels that he
said were used to launch rockets. He said more than half the targets of
the current operation had been concealed rocket launchers.

The car crash that killed Gene Erickson
caught the attention of federal regulators. Why did the Saturn Ion he
was traveling in, along a rural Texas road, suddenly swerve into a tree?
Why did the air bags fail? General Motors told federal authorities that
it could not provide answers.

But only a month earlier, a G.M.
engineer had concluded in an internal evaluation that the Ion had most
likely lost power, disabling its air bags, according to a subsequent
internal investigation commissioned by G.M.

Now, G.M.'s response,
as well as its replies to queries in other crashes obtained by The New
York Times from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,
casts doubt on how forthright the automaker was with regulators over a
defective ignition switch that G.M. has linked to at least 13 deaths
over the last decade.They provide details for the first time on the
issue at the heart of a criminal investigation by the Justice
Department: whether G.M., in its interaction with safety regulators,
obscured a deadly defect that would also injure perhaps hundreds of
people.

The company repeatedly found a way not to answer the
simple question from regulators of what led to a crash. In at least
three cases of fatal crashes, including the accident that killed Mr.
Erickson, G.M. said that it had not assessed the cause. In another fatal
crash, G.M. said that attorney-client privilege may have prevented it
from answering. And in other cases, the automaker was more blunt,
writing, “G.M. opts not to respond.” The responses came even though G.M.
had for years been aware of sudden power loss in the models involved in
the accidents.

The responses are found in documents known as
“death inquiries,” which The Times obtained through the Freedom of
Information Act. In those inquiries, regulators ask automakers to
explain the circumstances surrounding a crash to help identify potential
defects in cars.

On Thursday, the head of G.M.'s legal
department, Michael P. Millikin, is expected to face intense scrutiny
before lawmakers at a Senate hearing. He is scheduled to testify along
with, among others, Mary T. Barra, the chief executive, who faced a
harsh grilling before the same panel in April.

The Times asked
the safety agency for death inquiries related to fatal crashes in older
Chevrolet Cobalts and Saturn Ions, which are among the 2.6 million cars
with defective ignition switches that G.M. has recalled since February.
Of the 13 deaths linked to the defect, all of which involved Cobalts and
Ions, The Times received inquiries for four of them.

Mr.
Erickson was riding in the front seat of a Saturn Ion driven by Candice
Anderson in 2004. They were an hour from Dallas when the car suddenly
drove into a tree, killing Mr. Erickson but sparing Ms. Anderson. Only
recently did Ms. Anderson, who pleaded guilty to criminally negligent
homicide after the accident because she had a trace of Xanax in her
system, learn that she was not to blame.

Despite the earlier
determination by the engineer, Manuel Peace, that the engine’s shutting
off had most likely been the reason for the crash, G.M., in its response
to regulators, said there may not have been “sufficient reliable
information to accurately assess the cause” of the incident.

G.M.,
which also faced a lawsuit from Mr. Erickson’s family at the time,
further stated that attorney-client privilege may have been a reason it
could not make disclosures.

Ultimately, G.M. said it had not assessed the cause of the accident.

“It
seems inconsistent,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the
University of Richmond, who specializes in product liability. “It seems
like the company knew that the accident was attributable to power loss.
It does sound like they didn’t give N.H.T.S.A. everything they should
have. That could make them vulnerable to the Justice Department’s
investigation.”

When asked about G.M.'s responses to the
government’s death inquiries, James Cain, a spokesman, said on Tuesday:
“We are confronting our problems openly and directly. We are taking
responsibility for what has happened and making significant changes
across our company to make sure that it never happens again.”

In a
later death inquiry, G.M. chose not to say whether it had looked into
the circumstances of the December 2009 crash in Tennessee that killed
Seyde Chansuthus, who is also counted among the 13 victims. G.M. added
in its response that any privileged material related to the case would
not be shared. The company had not been sued by Ms. Chansuthus’s family
at the time.

But there had already been a thorough review of Ms. Chansuthus’s accident within G.M.

Six
days before that letter to regulators, lawyers representing G.M. had
presented an evaluation of the crash to the automaker, according to the
internal investigation conducted by G.M. this year. The lawyers warned
that G.M. could be liable for punitive damages because air bags in
Cobalts were known not to deploy in some cases.

In a third fatal
crash, involving the deaths of Amy Rademaker and Natasha Weigel, teenage
friends killed in Wisconsin in 2006, G.M. again responded that it could
not provide an answer to what caused the accident, using the same
language as in its reply to questions about Mr. Erickson’s crash.

In
this case, G.M. had received outside evidence that there was a problem
with the switch, including a state trooper’s collision report from
February 2007 that made the critical link between the faulty ignition
switch and the air bags failing to deploy. G.M.'s internal investigation
said that only one person inside G.M. had even opened the report,
though it was included in the reply to regulators, who also failed to
follow through. One of the requirements on the death inquiry is to
provide a copy of the police report.

When asked for comment,
David Friedman, the safety agency’s acting administrator, said, “G.M.'s
decision-making, structure, process and corporate culture stood in the
way of safety.”

G.M.'s reluctance to respond to the government
with evaluations of suspicious crashes extended beyond just the
accidents that the automaker has publicly linked to its ignition defect.

Several fatal crashes — including those of Benjamin Hair, 20,
in Virginia, and Amy Kosilla, 23, in New York — also had death
inquiries. In both those cases, when asked to explain why the vehicles
had driven straight off the road — with front impacts and no air bag
deployment — the automaker took advantage of the optional nature of the
question and did not reply. Death inquiries date back to the late 1990s,
when the safety agency was criticized for failing to spot highway
rollovers in Ford Explorers with Firestone tires, a problem eventually
tied to 271 deaths.

In response, Congress passed a law in 2000
requiring automakers to report to regulators any claims they received
blaming defects for injuries or deaths, so the government would not have
to rely only on consumer reports. The agency also has the ability to
dig deeper into any of those claims by then doing a death inquiry —
asking the automaker for documentation of each car accident and an
assessment of the circumstances leading to each crash.

In the
end, both G.M. and those charged with overseeing the company fell short
in protecting the public, Mr. Tobias, the law professor, said. “It’s
discouraging to see that both the company was not being as
straightforward as it might have been,” he said, “and that N.H.T.S.A.
was not being as rigorous about these inquiries that it should have
been.”

As
more workers find their lives upended and their paychecks reduced by
ever-changing, on-call schedules, government officials are trying to put
limits on the harshest of those scheduling practices.

The
actions reflect a growing national movement — fueled by women’s and
labor groups — to curb practices that affect millions of families, like
assigning just one or two days of work a week or requiring employees to
work unpredictable hours that wreak havoc with everyday routines like
college and child care.

The recent, rapid spread of on-call
employment to retail and other sectors has prompted proposals that would
require companies to pay employees extra for on-call work and to give
two weeks’ notice of a work schedule.

Vermont and San Francisco
have adopted laws giving workers the right to request flexible or
predictable schedules to make it easier to take care of children or
aging parents. Scott M. Stringer, the New York City comptroller, is
pressing the City Council to take up such legislation. And last month,
President Obama ordered federal agencies to give the “right to request”
to two million federal workers.

The new laws and proposals
generally require an employer to discuss a new employee’s situation and
to consider scheduling requests, but they do not require companies to
accommodate individual schedules. Many businesses have opposed these
measures, arguing that they represent improper government intrusion into
private operations.

In a referendum last year, voters in SeaTac,
Wash. — the community near Seattle that also passed the nation’s
highest minimum wage, $15 an hour for some workers — approved a measure
that bars employers from hiring additional part-time workers if any of
their existing part-timers want more hours. The move was a response to
complaints from workers that they were not scheduled for enough hours to
support their families. Some San Francisco lawmakers are seeking to
enact a similar regulation.

Representative George Miller of
California, the senior Democrat on the House Committee on Education and
the Workforce, plans to introduce legislation this summer that would
require companies to pay their employees for an extra hour if they were
summoned to work with less than 24 hours’ notice. He is also proposing a
guarantee of four hours’ pay on days when employees are sent home after
just a few hours — something that happens in many restaurants and
retailers when customer traffic is slow.

That happened to Mary
Coleman. After an hourlong bus commute, she arrived at her job at a
Popeyes in Milwaukee only to have her boss order her to go home without
clocking in — even though she was scheduled to work. She was not paid
for the day.

“It’s becoming more and more common to put employees
in a very uncertain and tenuous position with respect to their
schedules, and that ricochets if workers have families or other
commitments,” Mr. Miller said. “The employer community always says it
abhors uncertainty and unpredictability, but they are creating an
employment situation that has huge uncertainty and unpredictability for
millions of Americans.”

While Mr. Miller acknowledges that his
bill is unlikely to be enacted anytime soon — partly because of
opposition from business (and a Republican-controlled House), he said
the bill would bring attention to what he called often callous
scheduling practices. His bill, similar to one in the Senate sponsored
by Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, has a “right to request”
provision that would bar employers from denying requests from workers
with caregiving or school-related conflicts unless they had a “bona
fide” business reason.

Corporate groups protest that such
measures undercut efficiency and profits. “The hyper-regulation of the
workplace by government isn’t conducive to a positive business climate,”
said Scott DeFife, an executive vice president of the National
Restaurant Association. “The more complications that government creates
for operating a business, the less likely we’ll see a positive business
environment that’s good for the economy and increasing jobs.”

Mr. DeFife pointed out that the daily ebb and flow of customers necessitated flexibility in scheduling.

David
French, a senior vice president of the National Retail Federation, said
many people chose careers in retail because of the flexible work hours.

“These
proposals may sound reasonable, but if you unpack them, they could be
very harmful,” Mr. French said. “Where employers and employees now work
together to solve scheduling problems, you’ll have a very bureaucratic
environment where rigid rules would be introduced.”

While many of
these workers are not unionized, the labor movement has often battled
against part-time work and ever-changing schedules. But as unions have
grown weaker, employers have felt freer to employ part-timers and use
more volatile scheduling. Unions still push for workers to get more
hours — and those pressures are one reason Macy’s and Walmart have
adopted programs letting employees claim additional, available shifts by
going onto their employers’ websites.

In a climate where many
retailers, restaurants and other businesses are still struggling after
the recession, economists point to the increased uncertainty faced by
employees. About 27.4 million Americans work part time. The number of
those part-timers who would prefer to work full time has nearly doubled
since 2007, to 7.5 million. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics
data, 47 percent of part-time hourly workers ages 26 to 32 receive a
week or less of advance notice for their schedule.

In a study of
the data, two University of Chicago professors found that employers
dictated the work schedules for about half of young adults, without
their input. For part-time workers, schedules on average fluctuated from
17 to 28 hours a week.

“Frontline managers face pressure to keep
costs down, but they really don’t have much control over wages or
benefits,” said Susan J. Lambert, a University of Chicago professor who
interpreted the data. “What they have control over is employee hours.”

Ms.
Lambert said flexible, not rigid or unpredictable, hours would become
as important an issue as paid family leave. “The issue of scheduling is
going to be the next big effort on improving labor standards,” she said.
“To reduce unpredictability is important to keep women engaged in the
labor force.”David Chiu, president of the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors, has created a business-labor group that is trying to find
the middle ground.

“We’ve learned that predictability in hours is
important not just to help workers juggle their lives, but for economic
security — to help workers take a second job to live in expensive
cities like San Francisco or New York,” Mr. Chiu said. “We’re confident
that we can move forward with policies that work for workers as well as
business’s bottom line.”

Sharlene Santos says her part-time
schedule at a Zara clothing store in Manhattan — ranging from 16 to 24
hours a week — is not enough. “Making $220 a week, that’s not enough to
live on — it’s not realistic,” she said.

After Ms. Santos and
four other Zara workers recently wrote to the company, protesting that
they were given too few hours and received just two days’ notice for
their schedule, the company promised to start giving them two weeks’
advance notice.

Fatimah Muhammad said that at the Joe Fresh
clothing store where she works in Manhattan, some weeks she was
scheduled to work just one day but was on call for four days — meaning
she had to call the store each morning to see whether it needed her to
work that day.

“I felt kind of stuck. I couldn’t make plans,” said Ms. Muhammad, who said she was now assigned 25 hours a week.

A
national campaign — the Fair Workweek Initiative — is pushing for
legislation to restrict these practices in places including Milwaukee,
New York and Santa Clara, Calif. The effort includes the National
Women’s Law Center, the United Food and Commercial Workers union and the
Retail Action Project, a New York workers’ group.

“Too many
workers are working either too many or too few hours in an economy that
expects us to be available 24/7,” said Carrie Gleason, director of the
Fair Workweek Initiative and an organizer at the Center for Popular Democracy,
a national advocacy group. “It’s gotten to the point where workers,
especially women workers, are saying, ‘We need a voice in how much and
when we work.' ”

GAZA CITY — Maher al-Jarba, 2, one of the first casualties in the Gaza Strip when Israel
resumed airstrikes after a six-hour pause on Tuesday, writhed in terror
in an emergency-room bed as a nurse poked a needle into his hand. A
blast had knocked the curly haired boy down 11 stone steps, fracturing
his skull.

So his grandmother Wedad al-Jarba might have been
angry that Hamas, the militant group that dominates the Gaza Strip, did
not embrace the cease-fire proposed by Egypt,
and kept firing rockets as Israel briefly held its fire. Instead, she
shrugged. Like many Gazans interviewed, she said she longed for a deal —
one that would change life in Gaza. But she doubted Egypt’s proposal
would do that.

“Every time, they have a cease-fire, but then
everything comes back: the siege, the closures,” she said. “Then they
bomb again.”That ambivalence is widespread in the strip, a narrow,
25-mile-long Palestinian
enclave sandwiched between Israel, Egypt and the sea. It may help
explain why a beleaguered Hamas kept firing even after Israeli officials
declared that such a decision would justify further escalation.

Israel
occupied Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day War and controls its borders,
airspace and seas even now, nearly nine years after pulling out its
settlers and troops. Since then, tough restrictions have effectively
amounted to a blockade, reducing imports and exports to a trickle and
preventing all but a few Gazans from leaving. Short but devastating wars
deepen the misery.

Many Gazans say they are torn between
desperately wanting an end to the current round of bombings, which have
killed nearly 200 Palestinians here, including almost 40 children, and a
growing conviction that they cannot return to the way things once were.
Even Hamas’s many opponents here generally support its demands that
Israel release prisoners, and along with Egypt, lift border restrictions
that have gutted a weak economy.

“Everyone wants it to stop,”
said Dr. Ayman al-Sahbani, the emergency room chief at Al-Shifa Hospital
here. “Who would want to be bombed?”

Seeking to explain the
Gazan problem, he listed the hospital supplies lacking because of import
restrictions, even at Shifa, which at least could provide the CT scan
that Maher needed that he could not get at another hospital closer to
home. But then the doctor interrupted himself. The issue was not
material goods, he said — it was freedoms most people take for granted.

Sometimes,
he said, he thinks that Israel and the world simply do not understand
what it is like for Gazans, by and large, to be unable to leave what
many call an open-air prison.

“Do they not know, or is it that
their people are people and ours are not?” he said, adding that he
cannot go to medical conferences and his wife, a Ukrainian, has not gone
home for years for fear she would not be allowed to return.

Under
a date palm at the Batoon cafe Tuesday night, three old friends
described how they spent their precious six hours without airstrikes —
shopping and visiting adult children they had not seen during a week
spent indoors huddling.

The friends concluded that Hamas could
not commit to a cease-fire accord put forth without its participation
and one that did not reflect Palestinian aspirations. “We have the right
to defend ourselves against occupation,” said one, Radwan Abu Haseera,
36, a management professor.

Another, giving only a nickname, Abu
Anas, 45, said he was surprised Hamas did not pause its attacks. Many
Gazans oppose Hamas but are powerless against its arms, he said, and
while differences are forgotten under Israeli fire, people want change
and peace, even if it means compromise.

“The people here look
steadfast,” he said, “but psychologically they are very tired.” His
2-year-old daughter, he said, “looks at the sky and thinks the clouds
are smoke from rockets.”

“She looks at the stars,” he said, “and she thinks they are airplanes.”

Yet
Hamas supporters viewed the cease-fire proposal with deep suspicion.
Earlier, when officials from the Palestinian Authority, which embraced
the deal, visited the hospital, Hamas security officers and supporters
threw shoes them. Then they cheered as a rocket ripped skyward.

“Ya
Qassam, ya habib,” they chanted, referring with a term of endearment to
the Hamas militant brigades that fire the rockets. “Strike, strike Tel
Aviv.”

WASHINGTON — As a line of Blackwater
armored trucks pushed through heavy traffic away from the smoking
wreckage of Nisour Square in Baghdad one day in 2007, a turret gunner
waved his arms, telling nearby Iraqis to get down. He was warning them
about the threat of his own American convoy.

“At this point, my
teammate’s been firing wildly, and I don’t want these kids to get shot,”
the gunner, Matthew Murphy, recalled recently. “And I don’t want
anybody else to get shot.”

For years, Iraqis have described
running for cover, praying and watching family members die in the Nisour
Square shooting. Now, in court testimony that continues this week,
former Blackwater employees have offered the first public accounts of
what it was like inside the security company’s trucks that day.In a
courtroom at a federal courthouse here, the men confronted their onetime
colleagues standing trial for a shooting that left 17 Iraqis dead.
Their testimony recalled images from the Iraq war’s nadir, when Blackwater’s highly paid contractors guarded American diplomats as they tried to forge a lasting peace.

Almost
immediately, the Nisour Square shootings shattered the camaraderie of
the team, men who had shared lousy food and tight quarters, who had
trusted one another with their lives each day and played video games and
poker together at night. Each defendant stood, expressionless, as a
former colleague, Adam Frost, identified them in court on Monday.

“We’ve
been in firefights before,” said Mr. Frost, a former Army Special
Forces member and Blackwater contractor. “This one just felt different.”

It
unfolded on Sept. 16, 2007, after a car bomb exploded. As one
Blackwater team raced back to the safety of the Green Zone, a second
convoy known as Raven 23 moved into Nisour Square to stop traffic and
provide the first team a path. The shooting began soon after the Raven
23 trucks arrived. Prosecutors say Blackwater fired unprovoked.

“I saw people huddled down in their cars, trying to shield their children with their bodies,” Mr. Frost said Monday.

On
Tuesday, a third Blackwater guard, Mark Mealy, identified several of
his former colleagues who he said had fired. He said one teammate — he
could not say who — shot an unarmed Iraqi who was holding up his hands.
“And he just fell straight backward,” Mr. Mealy said.

The
contractors standing trial said they were caught in a firefight and
feared for their safety. They said the team leader called out, “Contact,
contact,” over the radio, indicating combat with an enemy. Another
colleague radioed that an Iraqi police officer was shooting at the
convoy, Mr. Frost testified.

When Mr. Murphy testified this
month, prosecutors asked time and again whether he had seen a danger
that warranted a Blackwater attack with machine guns and grenades.

“Did he appear to be a threat to you?”

“Did you see any threats to the Raven 23 convoy?”

“Did you see any men with AK-47s around that area?”

“Do you see any armed men at all?”

Each time, Mr. Murphy said no.

Over
all, however, the Blackwater testimony provided mixed results for
prosecutors. Mr. Murphy said he heard AK-47 gunfire, though he never saw
anyone firing on the convoy. Mr. Frost said he was certain the convoy
was under fire. And he said his teammates responded appropriately to the
day’s first target, a white sedan, which he said could have contained a
bomb.

Defense lawyers say the Blackwater guards were on edge
during one of the war’s most dangerous periods. Through
cross-examination of Mr. Murphy and Mr. Frost, the lawyers conveyed the
war’s terror. Both men spoke of seeing possible danger everywhere. Mr.
Frost recalled Iraqis — civilians and police officers alike — plotting
against Americans. He told jurors that, when he arrived in Iraq with the
Army in 2003, Iraqis greeted and cheered.

“We were like celebrities; everybody loved us,” he said. “I went back in 2007, and everybody hated us.”

A
fifth guard, Jeremy P. Ridgeway, has pleaded guilty to manslaughter and
is expected to testify later. Much of the most damning testimony so far
has been directed toward Mr. Ridgeway, and in a case with witnesses
disagreeing over who shot whom, defense lawyers are eager to portray him
as Blackwater’s villain.

Mr. Murphy said he was furious when the
convoy returned to the Green Zone. “I’ve seen people completely
unarmed, people doing nothing wrong, get shot,” he said. He called it
“the most horrible, botched thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Mr.
Frost said he knew immediately that the shooting would erupt into an
international episode. He and a few others met the next day and shared
concerns about what had happened. Soon, Mr. Frost said, he began to get
dirty looks and nasty comments from colleagues.

The team leader,
Mr. Frost said, did not share the concerns. “He basically said, if we
had problems with what happened out there, maybe we were the ones with
the problem,” Mr. Frost recalled. “And maybe we needed to find new lines
of work.”

A federal class action lawsuit filed late Tuesday accuses New York State health officials of denying or slashing Medicaid
home care services to chronically ill and disabled people without
proper notice, the chance to appeal or even an explanation, protections
required by law.

The lawsuit, filed in United States District
Court for the Southern District of New York, names three plaintiffs: an
impaired 84-year-old woman living alone in Manhattan, a frail
18-year-old Brooklyn man with severe congenital disabilities, and a
65-year-old Manhattan man with diabetes and a schizoaffective disorder.
But it was brought by the New York Legal Assistance Group on behalf of
tens of thousands of disabled Medicaid beneficiaries who need home
health care or help with daily tasks like bathing and eating.It
represents a challenge to an ambitious Medicaid overhaul by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo
that shifted $6 billion in public spending on long-term services,
including home care, to private managed care companies that are paid a
fixed sum for each enrollee. The goal of the overhaul, which was set in
motion in 2011, was saving money and improving the coordination of care.
But advocates for aged and disabled people have complained that in the
scramble for the most lucrative enrollees, companies are shunning frail
people with the greatest needs and signing up those who could be given
minimal services.

The lawsuit, filed against the state
commissioners of the Department of Health and the Office of Temporary
and Disability Assistance, takes these complaints to a new level,
charging that the state is now allowing companies to quietly reduce or
terminate home care to people whose need for services has not changed,
without giving them a meaningful chance to object.

Bill Schwarz,
a spokesman for the Health Department, and Anthony Farmer, a spokesman
for the disability assistance office, said the state does not comment on
pending litigation.

Janie Taylor, the lead plaintiff on the
case, was required last year, as part of the Medicaid overhaul, to
enroll in one of two dozen plans provided by private managed care
companies under contract to the state. Before the changes, Ms. Taylor,
an octogenarian with diabetes, high blood pressure and a dangerously
unsteady gait, had the help of an aide for 10 hours a day, seven days a
week. That care was continued at first by her managed care plan, VNSNY
Choice. But on July 1, the lawsuit says, without notice or explanation,
VNSNY cut her services to five hours a day, though her condition had not
changed.

“I’ve been trying to figure it out and talk about it
with God, why they’re doing this to me,” Ms. Taylor said in a telephone
interview Tuesday from public housing in Harlem.

Born in
Edgefield, S.C., and orphaned at a young age, she said, she came to New
York at 14 to care for other people’s children and clean houses, and
finally worked for 15 years as a live-in home care worker, until she
collapsed while lifting a patient and found she was sick herself.

A
social worker in Ms. Taylor’s physician’s office contacted VNSNY Choice
and requested an internal appeal to challenge the cut in hours, the
lawsuit said. But VNSNY called Ms. Taylor the next day, telling her the
internal appeal had been denied, and that her aide would leave at 2 p.m.
instead of 7 p.m. that very day. When a written notice of denial
finally appeared, it was mischaracterized as the denial of a request for
a service increase rather than the appeal of a reduction.

Ms.
Taylor contacted lawyers, who immediately called the disability
assistance office, requesting a fair hearing. Despite a state directive
to continue the full amount of care while the matter is pending, VNSNY
Choice has not restored Ms. Taylor’s hours, the lawsuit said. Her aide
used to fix her dinner and help her prepare for bed. Now, “I sleep in my
clothes,” she said.

Michael McKeon, a consultant speaking for
VNSNY, said in an email: “While we can’t comment on a specific case.
VNSNY cares for nearly 165,000 people every year and we work hard to get
every case right.”

Ben Taylor, one of the lawyers who brought
the suit — and no relation to the plaintiff — countered: “Sadly, with
the shift to managed care, Ms. Taylor is only one of many individuals
who are suffering because they are denied their basic rights.”

The
teenage plaintiff, Eddy LeMieux, has Noonan syndrome, a congenital
disorder that affects his heart, lungs, spine and mental functioning. He
lives with a severely disabled uncle and an aunt who works two jobs,
one at night, to support the family, the lawsuit says, and requires
24-hour care to live safely in the community. Mr. LeMieux was required
to enroll in Healthfirst, a managed care company, in 2012.

On
Jan. 14, Healthfirst sent a document saying his care would be tapered
from 12 hours, seven days a week beginning Jan. 25 to no care on April
22. It treated his 24-hour care as a new request, and denied it, saying
that “the medical director has determined that the amount of/level of
personal care services requested is not medically necessary.”

Despite
his aunt’s fair hearing request, the state did not order his care to
continue until officials were contacted by the New York Legal Assistance
Group in April. Healthfirst then reauthorized Mr. LeMieux’s home care,
but only for “sleep-in” help, not the two-shift continuous care the
directive required. Then the plan discontinued all care on May 6, until
lawyers intervened.

The third plaintiff, Anibal Santiago, is also
a Healthfirst client. Harris Brandt, a spokesman for Healthfirst, said
by law it could not talk about its clients.

GAZA CITY — My day here began at 6 a.m. Photographing something as unpredictable as war still has a routine.

It
is important to be out the door at first light to document the
destruction of the last night’s bombings. By midmorning, I check in at
the hospital’s morgue to see if families have come to pick up the dead
for burial.

On Wednesday, that sudden change of fortune came to four young Palestinian boys
playing on a beach in Gaza City.I had returned to my small seaside
hotel around 4 p.m. to file photos to New York when I heard a loud
explosion. My driver and I rushed to the window to see what had
happened. A small shack atop a sea wall at the fishing port had been
struck by an Israeli bomb or missile and was burning. A young boy
emerged from the smoke, running toward the adjacent beach.

I
grabbed my cameras and was putting on body armor and a helmet when,
about 30 seconds after the first blast, there was another. The boy I had
seen running was now dead, lying motionless in the sand, along with
three other boys who had been playing there.

By the time I
reached the beach, I was winded from running with my heavy armor. I
paused; it was too risky to go onto the exposed sand. Imagine what my
silhouette, captured by an Israeli drone, might look like as a grainy
image on a laptop somewhere in Israel: wearing body armor and a helmet,
carrying cameras that could be mistaken for weapons. If children are
being killed, what is there to protect me, or anyone else?

I
watched as a group of people ran to the children’s aid. I joined them,
running with the feeling that I would find safety in numbers, though I
understood that feeling could be deceptive: Crowds can make things
worse. We arrived at the scene to find lifeless, mangled bodies. The
boys were beyond help. They had been killed instantly, and the people
who had rushed to them were shocked and distraught.

Earlier in
the day, I had photographed the funeral for a man and a 12-year-old boy.
They had been killed when a bomb hit the car in which they were riding
south of Gaza City, severely injuring an older woman with them.

There is no safe place in Gaza right now. Bombs can land at any time, anywhere.

A
small metal shack with no electricity or running water on a jetty in
the blazing seaside sun does not seem like the kind of place frequented
by Hamas militants, the Israel Defense Forces’ intended targets.
Children, maybe four feet tall, dressed in summer clothes, running from
an explosion, don’t fit the description of Hamas fighters, either.

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8) Witness Accounts of Gaza Attack That Killed 4 Boys
By ROBERT MACKEY

Foreign correspondents reporting from Gaza on Wednesday offered visceral accounts of a deadly attack
that killed four children on the beach outside a hotel in which the
journalists were staying. Tyler Hicks, a New York Times photographer,
was among those who rushed from the hotel to the beach as a desperate
scramble unfolded to save the lives of other children wounded in the
shelling.

Witnesses said that the barrage appeared to come from the sea, where Israeli ships are enforcing a naval blockade.

Several other reporters, including Jonathan Miller of Britain’s Channel 4 News, Ayman Mohyeldin of NBC News and Peter Beaumont
of The Guardian, described the immediate aftermath of the shelling in
text accounts and images uploaded to Twitter, even as they tried to help
three other boys wounded in the barrage.

Mr. Mohyeldin reported
that the four boys who were killed in the attack were between 9 and 11
years old and had been playing soccer and hide-and-seek on the beach.

He also reported that the deaths illustrated that warnings from Israel’s military
urging civilians to evacuate the area are ineffective. “The vast
majority of the people here do not take the warnings seriously because
it’s not clear where they are supposed to evacuate to,” he said.

Mr.
Beaumont, who helped administer first aid to a boy with a shrapnel
wound in his chest, called the incident “a personal low point,” and reported that fellow journalists standing outside the Al-Deira hotel shouted “at unseen Israeli gunners who can’t hear them: ‘They are only children.'”

A Palestinian health official told Reuters
that the children were killed by shelling from an Israeli gunboat. The
Israel Defense Forces later said in a statement that it was
investigating the incident. “Based on preliminary results, the target of
this strike was Hamas terrorist operatives," the military spokesman’s
unit said.

Avital Leibovich, a former military spokeswoman who is
now the director of the American Jewish Committee office in Jerusalem,
expressed sympathy for the children, but blamed the Islamist militants
of Hamas for provoking the conflict that led to their deaths.

The Israeli military shared video
on social networks on Wednesday to illustrate that it takes what
officials have described as great pains to avoid civilian casualties.

A local news agency, Media 24, shared on Facebook what it said were images
of four people running from the shelling on the beach during the
attack. The authenticity of the photographs could not be immediately
confirmed, but a New York Times reporter in Gaza said that they seemed
to be genuine. A driver for the same agency was killed in an airstrike on his car last week, even though it was marked “TV.”

Mr. Miller later posted images of the funeral procession for the four boys killed Wednesday, and noted that they come from a family well-known in the area for its fishermen, “an extremely dangerous pursuit in Gaza.”

TAMPA, Fla. — The Palestinian-American teenager who relatives say was beaten by the Israeli authorities returned home to Florida late Wednesday.

Tariq
Abu Khdeir, 15, and his mother flew back to Tampa on a flight arriving
from New York and were greeted by about 50 cheering supporters waving
American and Palestinian flags. The Khdeirs had left Israel earlier in the day.

“I
am only 15, but I will never think of freedom the same as I did two
months ago,” Tariq said upon arrival at Tampa International Airport. “No
child, Palestinian or Israeli, deserves to be killed.”

The
teenager, who spoke only a few minutes, said prayers had helped him
through his ordeal. He also said he could not wait to see his friends
and go fishing.

Hassan Shibly, the teenager’s lawyer and the
executive director of the Florida chapter of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, had said Tariq suffered head trauma and
received stitches on his face when beaten two weeks ago after being
arrested during a protest. Supporters say Tariq’s beating was
videotaped. The Israeli Justice Ministry has said that an investigation
had been opened into the footage.

There were no immediately apparent signs of injuries to Tariq on his arrival.

The
Israeli authorities released Tariq shortly after his arrest and
sentenced him to nine days of house arrest while they investigated what
they said was his participation in violent protests in East Jerusalem
over the death of his cousin, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16. His family denied
that he had participated in the protests. Palestinians suspect Mohammed
Abu Khdeir was killed by Israeli extremists exacting revenge for the
abduction and killings of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank last
month.

Wiping tears from her eyes, his mother, Suha Khdeir, said Wednesday that the last two weeks had been a “nightmare.”

Friends
and family have said Tariq went on a vacation to visit relatives he had
not seen in about 10 years — not to be part of a conflict. They have
described him as a good student who likes basketball, soccer and video
games.

Tariq’s arrest happened shortly before Israel attacked
Gaza to stop Hamas members from launching rockets into its territory.
Earlier on Wednesday, Israel and Hamas agreed to a five-hour United
Nations brokered ”humanitarian” pause to their nine-day-long battle,
offering the most encouraging sign yet that the fierce fighting could
come to an end. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 200
Palestinians, including four boys struck on a beach Wednesday by shells
fired from a navy ship.

A Swedish court upheld its detention order on the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange,
on Wednesday, reaffirming the legal basis for an international warrant
that has kept him hiding in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for two
years. One of Mr. Assange’s defense lawyers, Per E. Samuelson, said “a
juicy, toxic appeal” of the decision was planned. Last month, Mr.
Assange’s lawyers filed a court petition to repeal the detention order —
imposed by the Stockholm District Court in November 2010 — on the
grounds that it could not be enforced while he was at the embassy and
because it was restricting Mr. Assange’s civil rights. He has not been
formally indicted in Sweden,
but he is wanted for questioning over allegations of sexual misconduct
and rape involving two women he met during a visit to Sweden in 2010. He
denies the allegations.

OYSTER
CREEK, Tex. — A shelter for Central American children who crossed the
border illegally opened behind Gregg Griffith’s house here a few months
ago. The children are quiet. No one has hopped over the fence that
separates his backyard from the shelter, a once-vacant youth home. But
when Mr. Griffith looks at the brightly painted brick buildings, he is
mostly resentful.

“That’s my tax money taking care of a foreign
national or however you want to classify them,” said Mr. Griffith, 51, a
volunteer fireman and researcher at a chemical plant. “I don’t want to
take care of a foreign national. It’s not my problem. We did house kids
in Brazoria County there at the youth home. I sort of feel like we
should be taking care of our own first.”Overwhelmed by an influx of
unaccompanied minors who are fleeing violence in their home countries in
Central America, federal officials are searching the country for places
to house them and have been forced to scrap some proposed shelter sites
in California, Connecticut, Iowa, New York and other states because of
widespread opposition from residents and local officials.

The politics of handling the wave of immigrants has grown toxic and holds perils for President Obama.

Some
of the opposition has also bordered on the extreme. A few of the
protesters who marched against a proposed shelter in Vassar, Mich., on
Monday were armed with semiautomatic rifles and handguns. In Virginia,
an effort to house the children at the shuttered campus of Saint Paul’s
College in Lawrenceville caused such an uproar that federal officials
pulled out, even though a five-month lease had been signed. Someone
spray-painted anti-immigrant graffiti on a brick wall at a former Army
Reserve facility in Westminster, Md., that was being considered as a
shelter site.

Some cities have raised health and security
concerns. Northeast of Oyster Creek, League City passed a resolution
opposing any shelters from opening even though the federal government
had no plans to do so. The resolution claimed that “illegal aliens
suffering from diseases endemic in their countries of origin are being
released into our communities.”

The organizations that are hired
by federal officials to run some of the emergency shelters housing
Central American children dispute claims that the children pose a health
threat. Krista Piferrer, a spokeswoman for Baptist Child and Family
Services, or B.C.F.S., which runs a shelter for Central American
children at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, said there had been
133 cases of lice, 25 cases of scabies, 15 cases of chickenpox and one
case of H1N1 flu out of thousands of children who have stayed at the
base since May.

“The illnesses that we’re seeing at these sites
are not unlike what public school nurses see,” said Ms. Piferrer, whose
organization operates temporary and permanent shelters for the children
in California and Oklahoma, as well as Texas. “We do not believe that
these children present any public health concern.”

Yet the
worries of neighbors and local officials persist. “We hate to see
something like this that would paint us as an unfriendly town not open
to all people,” said Robert J. Pecht, a councilman in Lawrenceville. “If
you signed up to live next to a four-year college, that’s one thing.
But you didn’t sign up to live next to something that requires Homeland
Security.”

In Southern California, where protesters in San Diego
County turned away busloads of migrant children in Murrieta and helped
squash a proposal to open a shelter in nearby Escondido, politicians and
residents have become more openly hostile to immigrants than at any
time in recent history.

“They’re not legal, and they expect to
come and get benefits,” said Richard Jones, 64, a retired electrician
who lives in Escondido. “It makes no sense at all. Why should we have to
serve them? Why should we have to pay anything?”

Congress is
considering changes to a 2008 law intended to stop sex trafficking that
has made it harder to quickly return the tens of thousands of children
caught crossing the border to their home countries.

Still, some
of the anger is partisan and aimed at the Obama administration. But it
is showing up in a wide range of places and people. Heidi Thiess,
the councilwoman in League City who drafted the antishelter resolution,
is a former Army officer who is white, has a racially mixed family and
lived for a time in Yucatán, Mexico, with her husband and children
helping to build a medical clinic and orphanage for the poor.

Federal
officials’ failure to seek local input is also to blame. Residents in
Oyster Creek said they learned about the shelter there from the local
news. Mr. Pecht, the councilman from Virginia, said federal officials
treated the plan in Lawrenceville as a “done deal” and left many local
questions unanswered.

Logistical as well as political issues
appeared to have scuttled a plan in Iowa to house the children at an
academy for at-risk youth. State officials were concerned about placing
the children at a facility on the same grounds as a medium-security
state prison, but Gov. Terry E. Branstad, a Republican, has suggested
that he did not want them housed in his state.

“I do have empathy
for these kids, but I also don’t want to send the signal, ‘Send your
kids to America illegally’ — that’s not the right message,” Mr. Branstad
told reporters Monday, adding: “Just because we’re an empathetic and
supportive country doesn’t mean that we can take everybody.”

Officials
with the federal Administration for Children and Families, which
oversees the housing of unaccompanied children as part of the Department
of Health and Human Services, declined to comment about the opposition
to shelter sites.

Rumors have proliferated in many communities.
Opponents said the migrant children would flood local school districts,
but their average stay in a shelter is roughly 30 days, and many are
placed with relatives who live elsewhere. Residents often believe the
shelters create a tremendous local cost, but they are typically run by
contractors paid by the federal government and operate at little if any
direct cost to municipalities.

In San Antonio, Ms. Piferrer, the
spokeswoman for the group that runs the shelter there, said their
shelters generate no local financial burden, although state resources
have been used. After a child at the Lackland base was found to have
H1N1 flu, the organization requested and received nearly 1,400 flu
vaccines from state health officials to give to children at the base.
The group then asked the state to send it the $26,000 bill for the
vaccines.In the heated debates over the shelters, the voices of some of
the people who live closest to them have been largely drowned out. Their
opinions are occasionally more welcoming than the headlines and
protests suggest.

In the Dallas County town of Grand Prairie,
officials had expressed skepticism about the plan to house hundreds of
children at a former school. But their concerns were eased after Clay
Jenkins, the county judge, and others went door to door in the school’s
neighborhood and found that residents were overwhelmingly positive.

“I
was blown away by their support,” said Mr. Jenkins, who is leading the
effort to house 2,000 children at three sites in the county. “I don’t
feel like we have to solve the border crisis for a terrified child to be
shown some compassion.”

On one street in Oyster Creek, those who
live next to the shelter, or have relatives who do, expressed a mix of
opinions. As Mr. Griffith spoke about how his tax dollars were being
used, Roberto Hermosillo, 46, worked in the front yard outside his son’s
house nearby. Mr. Hermosillo said he could sympathize with the journey
the children were making: His parents came to Texas illegally in the
1960s from Mexico and became American citizens.

“I was raised
from illegal parents that came into the U.S.A. and strived and survived
and struggled to maintain in the U.S.A.,” said Mr. Hermosillo, a
construction worker. “We have our children sometimes wander off into
other countries, to explore, to visit. How would we want them to be
treated?”

Brenda Browning, 65, lives so close to the shelter
that her grandchildren can touch the fence when they use the swing in
the front yard. And yet she has few complaints about the immigrants next
door. There have been no problems with crime, she said, and she has no
health concerns.

Ms. Browning is trying to sell her house,
though, and wonders if the shelter has turned off potential buyers. Even
so, she does not oppose it.

“I’ve got mixed feelings,” she said. “I know it’s not these kids’ fault that they’re being housed here. I’m a softy for kids.”

Jennifer Medina and Ian Lovett contributed reporting from San Diego.

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12) California Death Penalty System Is Unconstitutional, Federal Judge Rules

LA
QUINTA, Calif. — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that California’s
death penalty system is so arbitrary and plagued with delay that it is
unconstitutional, a decision that is expected to inspire similar
arguments in death penalty appeals around the country.

The state
has placed hundreds of people on death row, but has not executed a
prisoner since 2006. The result, wrote Judge Cormac J. Carney of United
States District Court, is a sentence that “no rational jury or
legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote
possibility of death.”

That sense of uncertainty and delay, he
wrote, “violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and
unusual punishment.”

About 40 percent of California’s 748 death row inmates have been there more than 19 years.

Judge Carney, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, issued the 29-page order vacating
the death sentence of Ernest Dewayne Jones, convicted in 1995 of raping
his girlfriend’s mother and stabbing her to death.

Calling it “a
stunningly important and unprecedented ruling,” Elisabeth A. Semel, the
director of the death penalty clinic at the University of California,
Berkeley, law school, said that the “factually dense” and “well
reasoned” opinion was likely to be cited in other cases in California
and elsewhere.

But its legal sweep will depend on the outcome of
the state’s likely appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit, she said.

Douglas A. Berman, a sentencing expert
at the Ohio State University law school, said the ruling could generate
appeals in any of a dozen states with large backups on death row and no
recent executions or infrequent ones, as well as the federal system,
which has had no execution in more than a decade.

“California is
the most extreme example, but Pennsylvania is pretty darned close,”
Professor Berman said. He questioned the logic, however, of granting a
prisoner “a windfall” because of a state’s inaction.

Professor
Berman suggested that California could address the court’s ruling by
saying, “ ‘We’ve got to get our act together and move forward with
executions.’ ”

“But,” he added, “that’s a heck of a lot easier said than done.”

California
voters affirmed the death penalty by a narrow margin in 2012, with 48
percent of voters favoring replacing it with life in prison without
parole. That vote, Professor Berman said, “may reflect that they’re
comfortable with a system that doesn’t get around to executing
somebody.”

The death penalty has been effectively under a
moratorium in the state since 2006, when Judge Jeremy Fogel of United
States District Court in San Jose ordered changes in the state’s
execution methods. In 2008, Ronald M. George, then the chief justice of
California, called the system for handling appeals in capital cases
“dysfunctional.” A state-appointed commission reached a similar
conclusion that year, stating the system was “plagued with excessive
delay” in appointing lawyers and in reviews of appeals and petitions
before the State Supreme Court.

Mr. Jones’s lead lawyer, Michael
Laurence, said in a statement that the legal team was grateful for the
decision, adding, “The execution of Mr. Jones, and the others like him
whose meritorious legal claims have gone unheard for decades, serves no
valid state interest.”

Mr. Jones’s trial for the killing in 1992
of Julia Miller, an accountant, got little attention at the time. It
took place down the hall from the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, and The
Los Angeles Times published an article comparing the “mundane murder
trial” with the nearby “trial of the century.”

Eric M. Freedman, a
professor at the Hofstra University law school, said that he doubted
the case would make it to the Supreme Court or set national policy on
the death penalty, but that it would still resonate.

“The
decision is incredibly important in bringing to public consciousness
that this has been a political shell game,” he said, with politicians
endorsing the death penalty but unwilling to provide the funds for
defense lawyers and efficient courts that would keep the system working.

Judge
Carney was scathing in his description of California’s administration
of capital punishment and said the flaws stemmed mainly from state
deficiencies, not abuse of the system by prisoners.

“When an
individual is condemned to death in California, the sentence carries
with it an implicit promise from the state that it will actually be
carried out,” he wrote. It is a promise to the people of the state, who
pay for the justice system, and to the jurors who see “evidence of
undeniably horrific crimes” and participate in the “agonizing
deliberations,” and to the victims and their loved ones. Not the least,
he added, “it is made to the hundreds of individuals on death row, as a
statement their crimes are so heinous they have forfeited their right to
life.”

However, Judge Carney wrote, “for too long now, the
promise has been an empty one,” and the result is “a system in which
arbitrary factors, rather than legitimate ones like the nature of the
crime or the date of the death sentence, determine whether an individual
will actually be executed.”

Thus, he concluded, the death penalty system in California “serves no penological purpose.”

“Such a system,” he said, “is unconstitutional.”

A
prominent supporter of the death penalty, Kent S. Scheidegger of the
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, disagreed. Mr. Scheidegger said he
found the decision “kind of surprising” since the argument that delays
are unconstitutional has been rejected by the Supreme Court. The reason a
majority of Americans support the death penalty, he said, “is that the
very worst murderers just plain deserve it — that remains true even
after long delays.”

Judge Carney, however, wrote that the Supreme
Court cases focused on each inmate’s individual delay. Instead, he
noted, Mr. Jones argued that his long-delayed execution would be
arbitrary and serve no state purpose “because of systemwide dysfunction
in the post-conviction review process.”

The state attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, is reviewing the decision, a spokesman said.

Erik Eckholm reported from La Quinta, and John Schwartz from New York.

SEATTLE — The legal road ahead for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, whose capture by the Taliban in Afghanistan
in 2009 is under investigation by the Army, is both narrowly
constrained by Army procedures and at the same time open to almost
complete discretion in what course the Army might take, from exoneration
to court-martial, his lawyer said Wednesday.

The facts of the
case are so unusual that few previous military justice cases provide any
illuminating comparisons, said the lawyer, Eugene R. Fidell,
who teaches military justice at Yale University and took on Sergeant
Bergdahl as a client last week. Sergeant Bergdahl, 28, was released about six weeks ago in exchange for five Taliban detainees.

The
Army is investigating the circumstances of his disappearance from his
platoon, which rotated duties between a tiny outpost in eastern
Afghanistan near the Pakistan border and a large forward operating base
to the northeast.“Past actions are not particularly instructive,” Mr.
Fidell said in a telephone interview.

Defense Department
officials said this week that Sergeant Bergdahl had finished undergoing
therapy and counseling at an Army hospital in San Antonio, and that he
would assume an active duty job
at the Army North headquarters at the same base, Fort Sam Houston,
where he will live in the barracks. He is also expected to meet with
Maj. Gen. Kenneth R. Dahl, the officer who is leading the investigation
of Sergeant Bergdahl’s disappearance and capture.

But even on the
base, a Defense Department official said, the circumstances of Sergeant
Bergdahl’s day-to-day life are not like any other soldier’s.

The
Army arranged, for example, to have soldiers speak with Sergeant
Bergdahl on base and play a role — either praising him for surviving
five years in Taliban custody or denouncing him as a deserter, the
official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the
investigation is not complete. The aim was to see how he would react to
what he will no doubt face as he steps back more and more into
mainstream life and the controversy that swirls around his capture and
the prisoner exchange that led to his release.

Sergeant Bergdahl
still also has some restrictions on what he can do and where he can go,
the Defense Department official said, and he has some nerve damage to
his feet that has affected his ability to drive. He has met with friends
from who came to Texas from Idaho, where Sergeant Bergdahl grew up, but
not yet with his parents, the official said.

Mr. Fidell said he
was unable, because of client confidentiality, to comment on any aspect
Sergeant Bergdahl’s mental or physical state or the questions that Army
investigators might pose in their inquiry.

“He’s been fully
occupied with the reintegration program,” Mr. Fidell added, referring to
the Army’s procedure for helping soldiers adjust and return to life
after captivity. “It’s a rigorous program that the Army runs. It’s every
intensive and very carefully done, and he has cooperated fully.”

He also said that Sergeant Bergdahl had expressed deep gratitude toward American officials, especially President Obama, for his release and return.

“Sergeant Bergdahl is deeply grateful to President Obama for having saved his life,” Mr. Fidell said.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

14) Israeli Ground Forces Invade Gaza

Nearly thirty additional Palestinian deaths confirmed overnight, including three children and a baby, as attack escalates

Nearly thirty Palestinians were killed overnight after Israel escalated its ongoing barrage of the Gaza Strip with a ground invasion
that included IDF troops and tanks crossing the border, new waves of
heavy artillery fire, and a surge in airstrikes from above.

According
to the Ma'an news agency, twenty-eight people are confirmed dead from
the attacks in the last fifteen hours. Among them were four children,
including a five-month-old baby.

The
Palestinian death toll since the start of the conflict exceeded 250,
including at least 24 who were killed overnight, according to health
officials in Gaza. Israel launched air strikes against more than 100
targets overnight. At least 11 were killed in one strike on Rafah.

Three
branches of the Entez family, around 60 people, were sheltering in a
house in Zeitoun when it was struck with an artillery shell shortly
after 8.45pm. Three of the family were killed – Abed Ali, 24, Mohamed
Ibrahim, 13, and Mohamed Salem, two – and four injured. Three of the
exterior walls destroyed in the blast.

In the wreckage of the
home on Friday morning, Salem Entez, 29, Mohamed Salem's father,
approached the Guardian with a plastic bag, which he opened to revealed
pieces of flesh he was collecting for burial. "This is my son," he said.

The Obama administration on Thursday continued to defend
the behavior of the Israeli government and its military. Though it
called the deaths of four children killed on a beach by Israeli shelling
"horrifying" it has continued to repeat its position that Israel "has
the right to defend itself" from militants in Gaza.

U.S. State
Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said the Obama administration "will
continue to underscore " to Israel that they "must take every possible
step to meet its standards for protecting civilians from being killed,"
but made no mention that the U.S. would take any action to stop the
violence.

This comment comes amid worldwide condemnation and
charges from human rights and other groups that argue Israel's military
attack on a besieged civilian population which has no way to flee the
violence is both disproportionate to the threat of rockets launched by
Palestinian fighters into southern Israel and a form of "collective
punishment."

UN agencies estimate 80 percent of Palestinian victims in Gaza are civilians and young children. According
to Defense of Children International-Palestine, almost fifty children
under the age of sixteen have been killed since Israel launched its
latest attack on Gaza eleven days ago.

As Mondoweiss editor Alex Kane wrote on
Thursday—citing new comments from Amnesty International, Human Rights
Watch, and others—the emerging "consensus among human rights groups" is
that "Israel is committing war crimes in strikes that are wiping out
civilians."

And UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon was among those in the international community expressing regret over Israel's decision, despite loud and repeated urgings against it, to launch its ground invasion.

"An already dangerous conflict has now escalated even further,” Ban stated at UN headquarters late Thursday.

“In
the past 24 hours, there have been a number of incidents involving the
deaths of civilians, including the appalling killing of four boys on a
beach in Gaza City,” he added. “I urge Israel to do far more to stop
civilian casualties. There can be no military solution to this
conflict.”

Looking at the specific impact on children and the
number of victims under the age of sixteen that have so far been killed,
Palestinian rights activist and editor of the Electronic Intifada
website Ali Abunimah writes:

By
Thursday evening in Gaza, at least fourteen Palestinians had been
killed in Israeli attacks before and after the brief ceasefire, bringing
the total to 237 fatalities since Israel’s round-the-clock assault
began on 7 July, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

Thousands
of people are expected to rally in Detroit Friday afternoon to demand a
moratorium on the city's mass shut-offs of water to households, which
they say has unleashed a public health emergency.

The
Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) announced last month it is
implementing a plan to escalate the disconnection of water to
households that have fallen behind on their bills to 3,000 a month. Nearly half
of all residents are behind on their water payments—a pool that is
likely to expand further as the city continues to increase its water rates and cut public services, including welfare and public pensions.

As
a result, thousands of Detroit residents are going without water,
despite its close proximity to the Great Lakes—which account for over
one-fifth of the surface fresh water in the world.

The disconnections have been condemned as a "violation of human rights" by a UN panel, with
the UN expert on the right to adequate housing warning they "may be
discriminatory" against African Americans. Many residents suspect the
shut-offs are part of a plan to get rid of bad debts to privatize water
services, and ultimately, drive residents out of this majority-black
city to make way for gentrification and corporate profits.

But organizers say Detroiters are finding creative ways to resist the water shut-offs and help each other get by.

Friday
morning, residents blocked the entrance to Homrich Inc., the company
contracted by the city to shut off water to homes. According to Howell,
the civil disobedience is still ongoing, with a standoff between
protesters and police. The direct action follows a similar protest
earlier this month, which led to the arrest of ten residents.

Ann Rall of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and the People's Water Board
told Common Dreams that "rapid response teams" have formed to warn
residents when contractors enter their neighborhoods to shut off their
water. Organizers are also going door-to-door in areas devastated by the
shut-offs to connect residents to crisis resources, including a Water Rights Hotline.
This is in addition to numerous "watering stations" set up across the
city, which, according to Rall, constitute "central locations where
people can access water and strategize how to organize."

At a
DWSD "community meeting" in the Detroit neighborhood of Grandmont
Rosedale Thursday night, activists and neighbors voiced anger about the
water shut-offs. And in Detroit's North End, one resident on Monday
physically stood over her water valve to prevent contractors from
shutting it off, according to Rall.

Numerous local organizations are pressing the city to adopt a Water Affordability Plan, which was passed by the Detroit City Council in 2005 but disregarded by DWSD.

And later this month, the Council of Canadians will send a water convoy to Detroit to deliver water to residents in need in what they have declared is a "solidarity action."

Organizers
express hope that Friday's protest will help lift the international
profile of the water crisis in Detroit. “Cutting off water to community
residents is a disgraceful attack on the basic human right of access to
safe, clean water,” said Jean Ross, co-president of National Nurses
United—which is playing a key role in organizing Friday's protest.

Rall
emphasized that, amid the "calculated, very heartless, and very
exploitative" actions the city is taking, local resistance appears to be
on the rise. "There are amazing things happening in Detroit," she said.

GAZA
CITY — Eight members of a single family, including four children, were
buried in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday, killed by a barrage of
Israeli artillery that hit their home Friday night, as artillery and
small arms fire echoed nearby from clashes between Hamas militants and
Israeli forces.

Israeli soldiers have taken control of the exit
points of 13 separate tunnels into Israel from Gaza and are engaged in
“urban warfare” inside the strip, along the boundary with Israel, while
working to destroy the tunnels, said Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military
spokesman. Hamas militants were fighting back with antitank missiles,
small-arms fire and grenades, and in one case, he said, even strapped
explosives to a donkey.Hamas militants entered Israel on Saturday from
the central Gaza Strip through one of the many tunnels the Israeli
military is seeking to destroy, firing on an Israeli patrol that killed
one of the militants and forced the rest back into Gaza, the Israeli
military said.

The Israeli government warned people in the Eshkol
area near Gaza to stay away from artillery fire during the clash, and
the military said the infiltrators had planned “a lethal attack” in a
nearby community. Hamas media also reported that its fighters had
“crossed enemy lines” and engaged Israeli forces.

The Palestinian
death toll in Gaza since July 8 has risen to 301, with more than 2,000
wounded, the Palestinian health ministry said. About 75 percent of the
casualties have been civilians, according to a United Nations count.

One
Israeli was killed by a rocket fired from Gaza into the Negev desert
Saturday morning. Hamas has fired more than 1,000 rockets into Israel
since July 8. With many rockets intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome
defense system and Israelis heeding sirens and taking cover, just one
other Israeli has been killed, near the Gaza border, by a mortar shell.

As
the funeral procession for the Abu Jarad family wound through the
streets of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, men took turns carrying the
bodies of an infant and a toddler, wrapped in bloody white shrouds, the
baby’s exposed face marked with blood. Adults’ bodies were wrapped in
the yellow flags of Hamas’s rival party, Fatah. Another killed in the
area was buried at the same time.

At the cemetery, small-arms
fire and artillery echoed close by during the prayers and smoke rose in
the distance. Hamas rockets whooshed into the sky from a launch site not
far away, an attack likely to draw return fire to the residential area.
Many mourners, fearing danger trickled away before the end of the
ceremony.

The dead were killed when a barrage of artillery hit
their house in Beit Hanoun, in northeastern Gaza, during heavy shelling.
The family was the latest of many here who have suffered mass
casualties in a single strike.

In Khan Younis, in central Gaza,
seven people were killed, mostly men, and others were wounded when a
drone struck a group of people in the middle of the city, the health
ministry said.

The number of Palestinians who have left their
homes for official United Nations shelters reached 50,000, according to a
U.N. spokesman. But the true number of those who have fled was likely
much higher, as most have taken refuge with friends and family.

The
Israeli military planned to distribute more leaflets Saturday advising
residents of Khan Younis, the nearby coastal area of Marasi and Al Burej
to evacuate, Colonel Lerner said. He said the military was working with
international organizations to help them find safe harbor, but he
acknowledged that there were not enough places to go.

“The
alternative is that they stay put and that is more dangerous to them and
that’s why we advise them to leave the area and take refuge, at least
temporarily,” Colonel Lerner said. “We are directing them toward safer
zones, safer areas, away from the areas where we plan to operate.”

But
many Gaza residents say they are unsure where to go, since fighter jets
and drones may strike anywhere. Israel blames Hamas for operating in
residential areas, and has urged Palestinians to move away from the
group’s personnel and rocket launch sites and to pressure Hamas not to
use their neighborhoods. Civilians here say they have little sway over
armed Hamas militants and do not always know that they are operating
nearby until it is too late.Colonel Lerner said Saturday morning that
Israeli troops had uncovered 13 distinct tunnels from Gaza into Israeli
territory since the ground offensive began, some of them as much as 30
yards underground, and multiple entry points beneath greenhouses and
open fields. He said the tunnels were all over the periphery of Gaza and
that he believed there were “tens” more. He would not say how long the
tunnels were or which locations inside Israel they led to.

“We have control over all of them, we’re in the process of demolishing them,” Colonel Lerner said.

Colonel
Lerner said that Palestinian militants had built the extensive tunnel
network over the past two years, and that Israeli intelligence had been
studying them with a special task force for a year to prepare for such
an operation.

“It is a substantive, strategic plan of extensive
tunnels in order to infiltrate into the state of Israel,” he said. “They
shifted all of their assets, all of their infrastructure, all of their
defensive capabilities, into these offensive capabilities in order to
have some element of surprise.”

As the engineer corps works to
destroy the tunnels with heavy machinery, other troops have taken up
defensive positions around them.

In Beit Lahiya overnight, he
said, Israeli forces entered a house and a man inside opened fire; he
was killed and three soldiers were wounded. Troops also found a militant
inside a tunnel and killed him. In a separate incident, a man seeking
medical assistance pulled out hand grenades and was killed by soldiers.

A
worker at an apparel store at Woodbury Common, an outlet mall north of
New York City, said that even though some part-time employees clamored
for more hours, the store had hired more part-timers and cut many
workers’ hours to 10 a week from 20.

As soon as a nurse in
Illinois arrived for her scheduled 3-to-11 p.m. shift one Christmas Day,
hospital officials told her to go home because the patient “census” was
low. They also ordered her to remain on call for the next four hours —
all unpaid.

An employee at a specialty store in California said
his 25-hour-a-week job with wildly fluctuating hours wasn’t enough to
live on. But when he asked the store to schedule him between 9 a.m. and 2
p.m. so he could find a second job, the store cut him to 12 hours a
week.

These are among the experiences related by New York Times readers in more than 440 responses to an article
published in Wednesday’s paper about a fledgling movement in which some
states and cities are seeking to limit the harshest effects of
increasingly unpredictable and on-call work schedules. Many readers
voiced dismay with the volatility of Americans’ work schedules and the
inability of many part-timers to cobble together enough hours to support
their families.

In a comment that was the most highly recommended by others — 307 of them — a reader going by “pedigrees”
wrote that workers were often reviled for not working hard enough or
not being educated enough. “How can they work more jobs or commit to a
degree program if they don’t know what their work schedule will be next
week, much less next month?” the reader wrote. “It’s long past time for
some certainty for workers. They drive the economy.”

Some readers
were shocked by the story of Mary Coleman, who, after an hourlong bus
commute, arrived for her scheduled shift at a Popeyes in Milwaukee only
to be told to go home without clocking in because the store already had
enough employees working. She wasn’t paid for the day.

“What happened to Ms. Coleman should be criminal,” wrote “JenD” of New Jersey
in the second-most-recommended comment. “These types of stories sound
like they were written by Charles Dickens in the mid-19th century.”

A
reader from South Dakota, “JDT,” wrote that he was baffled as to why so
many employers created turmoil for their workers by assigning them a
different schedule every week, making it hard to juggle their jobs with
child care or college.

“As a small-business owner for over 30
years, I have always been able to provide my part-time employees with a
firm, steady and predictable schedule,” JDT wrote.
“My employees are a vital and important asset. I treat them right, and
they do their best for me. It’s so easy ... Why can’t big business run
by M.B.A.s and highly compensated executives figure that out?”

JDT,
whose name is Jim D. Taylor, runs a combined law and real estate firm
in Mitchell, S.D. In a follow-up interview, he said: “In a small
business, if you’ve scheduled someone to work, there should always be
enough to do — you don’t send them home. I don’t know why big business
is any different.”

Mr. Taylor said his 26-year-old son, a
graduate of Minnesota State University who works at a Target warehouse,
had a schedule that bounced around from week to week — 22 hours some
weeks, 32 hours others, some day shifts and some night shifts.

“Why is it so hard to schedule someone for regular shifts?” Mr. Taylor asked.

A reader calling himself “Polish Ladies Cleaning Service”
wrote that in the housecleaning business, it was “a particularly
devilish problem” to maintain predictable schedules for employees. “If a
client cancels and there’s no work, there’s no work,” he wrote. “We try
to let everyone know ASAP, of course, but there are times when clients
do cancel literally at the very last minute!”

In a follow-up
interview, David Chou, the spokesman for Polish Ladies Cleaning Service,
a company based in Brooklyn, told of a woman with a $19,000-a-month
apartment who failed to confirm a housecleaning appointment scheduled
for that day. So the company had to tell the scheduled housekeeper she
was not needed that morning.

“We try to reschedule the ladies
with other clients if that’s possible, but probably about half the times
that’s not possible,” Mr. Chou said.

“Mary,” a reader from Atlanta,
said it was understandable why so many employers relied on part-time
workers. “We do still have issues with supply and demand that make it
difficult for some businesses to hire full time (e.g., retail
brick-and-mortar stores struggling with seasonal slowdowns and
competition from Internet stores),” she wrote.

“How is it so
many, and Obama, believe that workers have the right to tell their
employer what hours they will work?” she added. “I’m thinking many here
need to go to Europe or some other country. See how that works for you.
Our government has no right to dictate, only to protect workers from
abuse, and part-time is not abuse.”

One reader, a sales employee
at an Apple store, complained in a letter that her work schedule varied
every week, although she praised Apple’s medical, dental and vision
benefits, even for part-timers. In a follow-up interview she said she
was essentially required to be available anytime from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.
six days a week — she has designated Wednesday as her day off.

“Having
to give them that much availability, it means you’re at their mercy,”
she said, noting that her husband works Monday through Friday. “You
don’t know until the schedule comes out what your life will look like.”

Courtney
Moore, a cashier at a Walmart in Cincinnati, said in an interview that
she had been assigned about 40 hours a week until she told store
management in June that she would begin taking college classes most
mornings and some afternoons. She said she asked her manager to put her
on the late shift, but to her dismay, the store reduced her to 15 hours a
week.

“They said they need someone they could call whenever they
need help — and they said I’m not that person,” Ms. Moore said. She
said she would prefer being a dedicated full-time employee at Walmart
but had to take a second job at McDonald’s instead.

A middle-aged
New Yorker who lost his teaching job of two decades because of a budget
squeeze in his school district said he had applied for retail jobs and
was shocked by what he found.

“You had to be available every
minute of every day, knowing you would be scheduled for no more than 29
hours per week and knowing there would be no normalcy to your schedule,”
he wrote. “I told the person I would like to be scheduled for the same
days every week so I could try to get another job to try to make ends
meet. She immediately said, ‘Well, that will end our conversation right
here. You have to be available every day for us.’

“I asked, ‘Even
though I’m trying to get another job?’ ‘Yes.’ Then she just stared at
me and asked me to leave. What kind of company does this? What kind of
company will not even let you get another job?”

The
350-pound man, about to be arrested on charges of illegally selling
cigarettes, was arguing with the police. When an officer tried to
handcuff him, the man pulled free. The officer immediately threw his arm
around the man’s neck and pulled him to the ground, holding him in what
appears, in a video, to be a chokehold. The man can be heard saying “I
can’t breathe” over and over again as other officers swarm about.

Now,
the death of the man, Eric Garner, 43, soon after the confrontation on
Thursday on Staten Island, is being investigated by the police and
prosecutors. At the center of the inquiry is the officer’s use of a
chokehold — a dangerous maneuver that was banned by the New York Police
Department more than 20 years ago but that the department cannot seem to
be rid of. “As defined in the department’s patrol guide, this would
appear to have been a chokehold,” the police commissioner, William J.
Bratton, said at a news conference in City Hall on Friday afternoon.

He referred to police rules that forbid chokeholds
and define them as including “any pressure to the throat or windpipe,
which may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air.”

The
Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent city agency that
investigates allegations of police abuse, logged 233 allegations
involving chokeholds in 2013, making up 4.4 percent of the
excessive-force complaints it received. Although only a tiny fraction of
the chokehold complaints that the agency receives are ever
substantiated, the number of complaints has generally been rising.

A
decade ago, when the review board was receiving a comparable number of
force complaints, chokehold allegations were less frequent. They made up
2.3 percent of the excessive-force complaints in 2003, and no more than
2.7 percent in 2004.

“My throat was on his forearm,” one man
who was arrested in Queens testified in April in an internal police
disciplinary proceeding, describing how he “could barely breathe” after
an officer allegedly placed him in a chokehold.

It is unclear if
the chokehold contributed to the death on Thursday afternoon of Mr.
Garner, who was at least 6 feet 3 inches tall and who, friends said, had
several health issues: diabetes, sleep apnea, and asthma so severe that
he had to quit his job as a horticulturist for the city’s parks
department. He wheezed when he talked and could not walk a block without
resting, they said.

Nonetheless, the use of a chokehold in
subduing a large but unarmed man during a low-level arrest raises for
Mr. Bratton the same questions about police training and tactics that he
faced 20 years ago, in his first stint as New York City’s police
commissioner.

At
City Hall on Friday, Mr. Bratton said he did not believe that the use
of chokeholds by police officers in New York City was a widespread
problem, saying this was his “first exposure” to the issue since
returning as police commissioner in January.

Mayor Bill de
Blasio, standing next to Mr. Bratton, said, “Like so many New Yorkers I
was very troubled by the video,” referring to a bystander’s recording of
the incident, which was posted on the website of The New York Daily
News. The two police officers who initially confronted Mr. Garner have
been temporarily taken off patrol duty. The police declined to name the
officers but said one of them had been on the force for eight years and
the other for four years.

Late Friday, the mayor’s office
announced that Mr. de Blasio was postponing his family’s departure on a
planned vacation to Italy from Friday evening until Saturday. The
postponement was to allow Mr. de Blasio to spend more time making calls
to elected officials, community leaders and members of the clergy, and
talking to the police, about Mr. Garner’s death, the mayor’s press
secretary, Phil Walzak, said.

The encounter between Mr. Garner
and plainclothes officers, from the 120th Precinct, began after the
officers accused Mr. Garner of illegally selling cigarettes, an
accusation he was familiar with. He had been arrested more than 30
times, often accused of selling loose cigarettes bought outside the state,
a common hustle designed to avoid state and city tobacco taxes. In
March and again in May, he was arrested on charges of illegally selling
cigarettes on the sidewalk.

For years, Mr. Garner chafed at the
scrutiny by the police, which he considered harassment. In 2007, he
filed a handwritten complaint in federal court accusing a police officer
of conducting a cavity search of him on the street, “digging his
fingers in my rectum in the middle of the street” while people passed
by.

More recently, Mr. Garner told lawyers at Legal Aid that he
intended to take all the cases against him to trial. “He was adamant he
wouldn’t plead guilty to anything,” said Christopher Pisciotta, the
lawyer in charge of the Staten Island office of Legal Aid.

Despite
all the scrutiny from the police, most days Mr. Garner, a father of
six, would stand on Bay Street, in the Tompkinsville neighborhood, his
ankles visibly swollen, hawking loose Lucky cigarettes for 50 cents
each.

On Thursday, when officers confronted him nearby and
accused him of selling tobacco to a man in a red shirt, Mr. Garner
reacted with exasperation, suggesting he was not going to cooperate.
“I’m tired of it,” he said. “This stops today.”

“I didn’t do nothing,” Mr. Garner tells an officer. “Every time you see me, you want to harass me, you want to stop me.”

At
one point he has his hands on his hips; at other points he is gesturing
energetically. “Please just leave me alone,” he says. In the video, Mr.
Garner can be seen crawling forward on the ground as an officer hangs
on with his arm around Mr. Garner’s neck. Other officers surround Mr.
Garner.

Soon, the officer releases his grip around Mr. Garner’s neck and, kneeling, presses Mr. Garner’s head into the sidewalk.

Mr. Garner was pronounced dead a short time later at Richmond University Medical Center.

Mr.
Pisciotta, the Legal Aid lawyer who knew Mr. Garner as a frequent
client, said he was struck by how quickly the officers resorted to
putting “him into a chokehold,” perhaps in reaction to Mr. Garner’s
formidable size.

Mr. Pisciotta said that Mr. Garner, however
imposing his appearance, was “a gentle giant,” who was known for
breaking up fights.

“To me it looks like they saw a mountain of a
man and they decided to take him down using immediate and significant
force,” Mr. Pisciotta said.

On Friday, a woman at Mr. Garner’s
home, who identified herself as a cousin named Stephanie, said: “The
family is very, very sad. We’re in shock. Why did they have to grab him
like that?”

PESHAWAR,
Pakistan — Fifteen militants were killed early Saturday morning when an
American drone struck a compound in the Pakistani tribal region of
North Waziristan, according to local residents and a security official.
It was the fourth known drone strike in the region since Pakistan
launched a military operation there last month.

Residents said
the drone fired four missiles into the compound about 2 a.m. They said
that 10 of the militants killed were from Punjab, Pakistan’s largest
province, and that the five others were Uzbeks affiliated with the
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The strike occurred in the village of
Datta Khel, a few miles from the Afghan border.

A security
official gave a slightly different account, saying that six missiles had
been fired at the compound, and that two vehicles loaded with
explosives had been struck. “There are tents and there are mud houses,
occupied by militants fleeing Miram Shah and Mir Ali,” the official
said, describing the compound and referring to two nearby towns that
have been hubs of jihadist activity. The army says it has cleared Miram Shah of militants, and a ground offensive is continuing in Mir Ali.

Most
of those killed in the strike on Saturday were Taliban from Punjab, the
official said. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was
not authorized to talk to the news media.

The Pakistani military,
which began its operation in North Waziristan on June 15, says it has
lost 26 men in the fighting, including two officers. It estimates that
400 militants have been killed.

Violence has also escalated
elsewhere. Late Friday night, militants killed eight paramilitary
security personnel in an attack on a vehicle in the town of Jamrud in
the Khyber tribal region, near the city of Peshawar. “These are the
people who have fled the operation in North Waziristan and have taken
shelter here,” a senior government official said, referring to the
extremists. Four police officers in Peshawar were also killed in attacks
by militants on Friday.

WASHINGTON
— Tens of thousands of prisoners serving time for federal drug offenses
will be eligible to seek early release beginning next year.

The United States Sentencing Commission,
which voted in April to reduce the penalties for most drug crimes,
voted unanimously on Friday to make that change retroactive. It will
apply to nearly 50,000 federal inmates who are serving time under the
old rules.

The Sentencing Commission said the move would help
ease prison overcrowding and reduce prison spending, which makes up
about a third of the Justice Department’s budget. The change comes amid a
bipartisan effort to roll back the harshest penalties set during the
height of the drug war.

Civil rights groups and prison-reform advocates cheered the decision. Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project,
called it a “historic shift in the decades-long war on drugs, which has
filled half of federal prison cells with people convicted of drug
offenses.”

The commission estimated that, on
average, eligible prisoners could have their sentences reduced by about
two years and will have served about nine years in prison.

The
thousands of early releases will not happen immediately. New prisoners
will become eligible each year as they approach the end of their
sentences. Each request for early release will be reviewed by a federal
judge.

Fresh
from defeating Obama’s nominee to head the Civil Rights Division of the
Justice Department because he served for a period as Mumia’s attorney,
the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) is attacking an Oakland teacher’s
lesson plan that asks students to compare the censorship of Martin
Luther King’s later, thoroughly radical positions with the censorship of
Mumia Abu-Jamal’s prison writings. As a result of this intimidation
from the FOP, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) took down an
entire web site—Urban Dreams—which contained this as well as educational
material on a diverse range of issues!

The following is an open
letter by the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee protesting this
outrageous act of police-state censorship . . .

Stop the Censorship!Restore the Urban Dreams web site!

Open letter to Oakland School Board members:May 28, 2014

Members
of the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee, including (among others)
the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), BART workers
and AC Transit bus drivers, were appalled to hear that the Oakland
Unified School District succumbed to pressure from the Fraternal Order
of Police (FOP) and the right-wing Fox News by shutting down the
educational Urban Dreams website, which includes material on Mumia
Abu-Jamal and Martin Luther King Jr.

In effect, academic freedom
was pushed to a back seat of the bus. This censorship is wrong. The
Urban Dreams website must be restored immediately for all to freely
visit and learn.

If not, OUSD administration has joined in with
the FOP’s vendetta against Mumia Abu-Jamal. The target of the FOP-Fox
News smears was a lesson plan by Oakland teacher Craig Gordon asking
students to compare the media’s wall of silence on Martin Luther King’s
militant anti-corporate, anti-war campaigning with its wall of silence
on Mumia’s writings.

To take that lesson plan down, OUSD took
down the entire Urban Dreams website, a website containing many rich and
evocative teacher-developed lessons, of which Gordon’s is one. Several
of these lesson plans were still in active use by teachers in Oakland
and elsewhere. [Urban Dreams was initially set up under a grant from the
federal Dept. of Education in 1999-2004].

Academic freedom was pushed to the back of the bus. This censorship is wrong!

Mumia
Abu-Jamal, a Black journalist called the “voice of the voiceless,” was
framed for the murder of a Philadelphia policeman over 30 years ago and
sentenced to death. Only recently was this innocent man removed from
death row.

Fifteen years ago, in the best tradition of the
abolitionists, Oakland teachers initiated a teach-in on the plight of
Mumia Abu-Jamal and the vestige of slavery, the death penalty. Indeed,
Craig Gordon was one of the organizers of that teach-in.

Following
that stellar example in 1999, striking school teachers in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, demanded his release from prison. As well, longshore
workers shutdown all West Coast ports and led a march of 25,000 strong
in San Francisco calling for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Workers
in the Bay Area, especially here in Oakland, have a long and proud
tradition of defending Black victims of the racist state oppression –
from Martin Luther King Jr. to Angela Davis to Huey Newton to Oscar
Grant.

Oakland teachers have an obligation to teach that history and students have a right to learn from that history!

The Urban Dreams website must be restored immediatelyfor all to freely visit and learn!

AN URGENT FUNDRAISER FOR LYNNE STEWART'S MEDICAL NEEDS CONTINUEShttp://lynnestewart.org/LYNNE STEWART HAS JUST BEEN DENIED MEDICAL BENEFITS. SHE CAN'T RE-APPLY UNTIL JULY! SHE IS IN URGENT NEED OF OUR HELP NOW!Because
of a determined people’s movement, Lynne is finally home with her
family. But she has urgent medical needs and costs. Lynne’s Stage 4
breast cancer spread a year ago to both lungs, back, bones and lymph
nodes. Now 74, she has lost weight and has trouble breathing; doctors
estimate her lifespan at 12 months. Lynne will soon begin treatment
requiring her to pay deductibles and co-payments. To boost the odds,
she’ll use a special diet, vitamins, and other healing methods – some
costly and none covered by insurance.Lynne’s spirit is indomitable – help her fight to survive!“I fought lions, I fought tigers, and I’m not going to let cancer get me,” Stewart said.Lynne has always come to the aid of those who needed her. Now it’s our turn to stand by Lynne.SEND LYNNE A DONATION TO:On line at:http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lynne-stewart-s-medical-fund Or by USPS to:Lynne Stewart Defense Committee 1070 Dean Street? Brooklyn, New York 11216

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Tell Maj. Gen. Buchanan why Chelsea deserves to be free!

PVT Chelsea Manning has served nearly four years in prison, yet she’s
showing a remarkable spirit of persistence. She is unjustly imprisoned,
but not defeated. With plans to enroll in a prelaw/political science
university program, and a legal name change underway, she continues
planning for her future and working to fulfill her dreams. She is
determined to make the best of her situation. However, we know she could
contribute more to the world if she was free.Please write a letter to Convening Authority Major General Buchanan today urging him to reduce Chelsea’s sentence!We began collecting letters to include in PVT Manning’s clemency
packet last fall. We expected that the military would finalize her
record of trial last December, and that she could then submit her
application to Maj. Gen. Buchanan by the end of 2013. Just like so many
times before, however, the military’s process has slowed Chelsea’s
ability to defend her rights. Defense attorney David Coombs now
estimates that it will be at least another month before the clemency
application can be submitted.Want to make sure decision-makers know why you believe Chelsea
deserves to go free? If you haven’t done so yet, please write a short
letter to Maj. Gen. Buchanan. Hundreds of people have already submitted
letters for us to use, including Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel
Ellsberg and award-winning author Alice Walker. As Alice Walker wrote:

Private Manning was the one soldier willing to speak out
against what he thought was wrong. When others silently followed orders,
Manning could not. Pvt. Manning is a humanist, meaning he sees humanity
before nationality, and values human life above all else. When he
released documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, he wanted the American people,
and the world, to judge for themselves if the U.S. military was properly
valuing human life in Iraq and Afghanistan. As taxpayers who fund that
military, we deserve that opportunity.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*Only an Innocent Man Would Voluntarily Returnto Prison to Fight Against his Life Sentenceand For Exoneration —That Courageous Man is Lorenzo Johnson.

On
January 29, 2014 Lorenzo Johnson’s attorney, Michael Wiseman, met with
representatives of PA Attorney General Kathleen Kane to discuss the new
evidence of Lorenzo Johnson’s innocence contained in legal filings now
pending in the Pennsylvania courts. This includes affidavits confirming
Johnson’s presence in New York City at the time of the Harrisburg murder
and the identity of the actual killers, as well as police and
prosecutorial misconduct.

Attorney Wiseman said Kane’s office
promised to investigate these new facts in order to assess whether they
merit the relief that Lorenzo Johnson seeks in his PCRA petition.

Speaking
to AP reporter Mary Claire Dale on February 11, 2014 Wiseman said, “We
believe the witnesses we presented to them are credible, and give a
coherent version of the events. I take them at their word, that they’re
going to do a straightforward, honest review.” Kane spokesman Joe
Peters confirmed the meeting to AP “but said the office won’t comment on
the new evidence until the court filing,” (referring to the March 31,
2014 date for the AG’s response to Johnson’s October 2013 court filing).

It
is the Office of the PA Attorney General that is responsible for the
false prosecution of Lorenzo Johnson from trial through appeals. And
just a few months ago, the Attorney General’s office opposed a federal
petition based on this new evidence saying there was no prima facie
claim for relief. This resulted in the denial of Lorenzo Johnson’s
Motion to File a Second Writ of Habeas Corpus in the federal court.

On
December 18, 2013 a press conference called by the Campaign to Free
Lorenzo Johnson protested these actions of the PA Attorney General and
delivered petitions demanding dismissal of the charges and immediate
freedom for Lorenzo. Tazza, Lorenzo’s wife, declared, “1,000 signatures
means we are not in this alone…I won't stop until he’s home. There is
nothing and no one that can stop me from fighting for what’s right.”

This
is Lorenzo Johnson’s second fight for his innocence and freedom. In
January 2012, after 16 years of court battles to prove his innocence, a
federal appeals court held his sentence was based on insufficient
evidence – a judicial acquittal. Lorenzo was freed from prison. But
after a petition filed by the PA Attorney General the U.S. Supreme Court
reinstated Lorenzo Johnson’s conviction and he was re-incarcerated to
continue serving a life sentence without parole for a murder he did not
commit.

This innocent man drove himself back to prison in June
2012—after less than five months of freedom—leaving his new wife and
family, construction job and advocacy on behalf of others wrongfully
convicted. The reason Lorenzo Johnson voluntarily returned to prison?
Because he is innocent and fighting for full vindication.

In the
words of Lorenzo Johnson, “A second is too long to be in prison when
you are Innocent, so eighteen years … is Intolerable.”

Today
we issue an international call for Spring Days of Action—2014, a
coordinated campaign in April and May to end drone killings, drone
surveillance and global militarization. The campaign will focus on drone bases, drone research facilities and test sites and drone manufacturers. The campaign will provide information on: 1.
The suffering of tens-of-thousands of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Yemen, Somalia and Gaza who are under drone attack, documenting the
killing, the wounding and the devastating impact of constant drone
surveillance on community life. 2. How attack and surveillance
drones have become a key element in a massive wave of surveillance,
clandestine military attacks and militarization generated by the United
States to protect a global system of manufacture and oil and mineral
exploitation that is creating unemployment and poverty, accelerating the
waste of nonrenewable resources and contributing to environmental
destruction and global warming. In addition to cases in the
Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, we will examine President Obama’s
“pivot” into the Asia-Pacific, where the United States has already sold
and deployed drones in the vanguard of a shift of 60 percent of its
military forces to try to control China and to enforce the planned
Trans-Pacific Partnership. We will show, among other things, how this
surge of “pivot” forces, greatly enabled by drones, and supported by the
U.S. military-industrial complex, will hit every American community
with even deeper cuts in the already fragile social programs on which
people rely for survival. In short, we will connect drones and
militarization with “austerity” in America. 3. How drone attacks
have effectively destroyed international and domestic legal protection
of the rights to life, privacy, freedom of assembly and free speech and
have opened the way for new levels of surveillance and repression around
the world, and how, in the United States, increasing drone
surveillance, added to surveillance by the National Security Agency and
police, provides a new weapon to repress black, Hispanic, immigrant and
low-income communities and to intimidate Americans who are increasingly
unsettled by lack of jobs, economic inequality, corporate control of
politics and the prospect of endless war. We will discuss how
the United States government and corporations conspire secretly to
monitor U.S. citizens and particularly how the Administration is
accelerating drone surveillance operations and surveillance inside the
United States with the same disregard for transparency and law that it
applies to other countries, all with the cooperation of the Congress. The campaign will encourage activists around the world to win passage
of local laws that prohibit weaponized drones and drone surveillance
from being used in their communities as well as seeking national laws to
bar the use of weaponized drones and drone surveillance. The campaign will draw attention to the call for a ban on weaponized drones by RootsAction.org that has generated a petition with over 80,000 signers: http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6180And to efforts by the Granny Peace Brigade (New York City), KnowDrones.org and others to achieve an international ban on both weaponized drones and drone surveillance. The campaign will also urge participation in the World Beyond War movement.

Sireen
Khudairy was arrested again at 4am on Tuesday 7th January 2014. According to
reports she has been taken to Huwwara military point. When the Israeli army
took her from her home they didn't show any papers to her or the person she was
with.

This
follows eight months of harassment of this 24-year-old Palestinian woman who is
a teacher, activist and supporter of the non-violent action against the Israeli
occupation. She was previously imprisoned from May to July 2013, and has been
subjected to frequent harassment ever since. See further details at:

http://freesireen.wordpress.com

Please
help by contacting your Embassies urgently to demand her release and spread her
appeal widely. Follow updates on:

https://www.facebook.com/FreeSireenKhudiri?ref=hl

Please
contact us to let us know any action you take. We will pass this information on
to her family. Thanks for your solidarity and support.

Steven Katsineris, January 2014

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

U.S.
Court of Appeals Rules Against Lorenzo Johnson’s
New Legal Challenge to His Frame-up Conviction!
Demand the PA Attorney General Dismiss the Charges!
Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

The
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied Lorenzo Johnson’s motion to
file a Second Habeas Corpus Petition. The order contained the outrageous
declaration that Johnson hadn’t made a “prima facie case” that he had new
evidence of his innocence. This not only puts a legal obstacle in Johnson’s
path as his fight for freedom makes its way (again) through the state and
federal courts—but it undermines the newly filed Pennsylvania state appeal that
is pending in the Court of Common Pleas.

Stripped
of “legalese,” the court’s October 15, 2013 order says Johnson’s new
evidence was not brought into court soon enough—although it was the prosecution
and police who withheld evidence and coerced witnesses into lying or not coming
forward with the truth! This, despite over fifteen years and rounds of legal
battles to uncover the evidence of government misconduct. This is a set-back
for Lorenzo Johnson’s renewed fight for his freedom, but Johnson is even more
determined as his PA state court appeal continues.

Increased
public support and protest is needed. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson’s freedom
is not only a fight for this courageous man and family. The fight for Lorenzo
Johnson is also a fight for all the innocent others who have been framed and
are sitting in the slow death of prison. The PA Attorney General is directly
pursuing the charges against Lorenzo, despite the evidence of his innocence and
the corruption of the police. Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

—Rachel
Wolkenstein, Esq.

October 25, 2013

For
more on the federal court and PA state court legal filings.

Hear
Mumia’s latest commentary, “Cat Cries”

Go
to: www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org for more information, to sign the petition, and
how to help.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

PUSH
CHELSEA'S JAILERS TO RESPECT HER IDENTITY

Call
and write Ft Leavenworth today and tell them to honor Manning's wishes around
her name and gender:

Call:
(913) 758-3600

Write
to:

Col.
Sioban Ledwith, Commander

U.S.
Detention Barracks

1301
N Warehouse Rd

Ft.
Leavenworth KS 66027

Private
Manning has been an icon both for the government transparency movement and
LGBTQ activists because of her fearlessness and acts of conscience. Now, as she
begins serving her sentence, Chelsea has asked for help with legal appeals,
family visits, education, and support for undergoing gender transition. The
latter is a decision she’s made following years of experiencing gender
dysphoria and examining her options. At a difficult time in her life, she
joined the military out of hope–the hope that she could use her service to save
lives, and also the hope that it would help to suppress her feelings of gender
dysphoria. But after serving time in Iraq, Private Manning realized what
mattered to her most was the truth, personal as well as political, even when it
proved challenging.

Now
she wants the Fort Leavenworth military prison to allow her access to hormone
replacement therapy which she has offered to pay for herself, as she pursues
the process to have her name legally changed to ‘Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.’

To
encourage the prison to honor her transgender identity, we’re calling on
progressive supporters and allies to contact Fort Leavenworth officials
demanding they acknowledge her requested name change immediately. Currently,
prison officials are not required to respect Chelsea’s identity, and can even
refuse to deliver mail addressed to the name ‘Chelsea Manning.’ However, it’s
within prison administrators’ power to begin using the name ‘Chelsea Manning’
now, in advance of the legal name change which will most likely be approved
sometime next year. It’s also up to these officials to approve Private
Manning’s request for hormone therapy.

Call:
(913) 758-3600

Write
to:

Col.
Sioban Ledwith, Commander

U.S.
Detention Barracks

1301
N Warehouse Rd

Ft.
Leavenworth KS 66027

Tell
them: “Transgender rights are human rights! Respect Private Manning’s identity
by acknowledging the name ‘Chelsea Manning’ whenever possible, including in
mail addressed to her, and by allowing her access to appropriate medical
treatment for gender dysphoria, including hormone replacement therapy (HRT).”

While
openly transgender individuals are allowed to serve in many other militaries
around the world, the US military continues to deny their existence. Now, by
speaking up for Chelsea’s right to treatment, you can support one brave
whistleblower in her personal struggle, and help set an important benchmark for
the rights of transgender individuals everywhere. (Remember that letters
written with focus and a respectful tone are more likely to be effective.) Feel
free to copy this sample letter.

Earlier
this year, the Private Manning Support Network won the title of most
“absolutely fabulous overall contingent” at the San Francisco Pride Parade, the
largest celebration of its kind for LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay Bisexual, Transgender
and Questioning) people nationwide. Over one thousand people marched for
Private Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning in that parade, to show LGBTQ
community pride for the Iraq War’s most well-known whistleblower.

Help
us continue to cover 100%
of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donate today.

We
are working to ensure that the ACCJC’s authority is not renewed by the
Department of Education this December when they are up for their 5-year
renewal. Our campaign made it possible for over 50 Third Party Comments to be
sent to the DOE re: the ACCJC. Our next step in this campaign is to send a
delegation from CCSF to Washington, D.C. to give oral comments at the hearing
on December 12th. We expect to have an array of forces aligned on the other
side who have much more money and resources than we do.

So
please support this effort to get ACCJC authority revoked!

LEGAL
CAMPAIGN

Save
CCSF members have been meeting with Attorney Dan Siegel since last May to
explore legal avenues to fight the ACCJC. After much consideration, and
consultation with AFT 2121’s attorney as well as the SF City Attorney’s office,
Dan has come up with a legal strategy that is complimentary to what is already
being pursued. In fact, AFT 2121’s attorney is encouraging us to go forward.

The
total costs of pursuing this (depositions, etc.) will be substantially more
than $15,000. However, Dan is willing to do it for a fixed fee of $15,000. He
will not expect a retainer, i.e. payment in advance, but we should start
payments ASAP. If we win the ACCJC will have to pay our costs.

PLEASE
HELP BOTH OF THESE IMPORTANT EFFORTS!

Checks
can be made out to Save CCSF Coalition with “legal” in the memo line and sent
to:

16
Years in Solitary Confinement Is Like a "Living Tomb"

American
Civil Liberties Union petition to end long-term solitary confinement:

California
Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard: We stand with the prisoners on hunger
strike. We urge you to comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in
America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long-term solitary
confinement.

In
California, hundreds of prisoners have been held in solitary for more than a
decade – some for infractions as trivial as reading Machiavelli's "The
Prince."

Gabriel
Reyes describes the pain of being isolated for at least 22 hours a day for the
last 16 years:

“Unless
you have lived it, you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by yourself,
between four cold walls, with little concept of time…. It is a living tomb …’ I
have not been allowed physical contact with any of my loved ones since 1995…I
feel helpless and hopeless. In short, I am being psychologically tortured.”

That’s
why over 30,000 prisoners in California began a hunger strike – the biggest the
state has ever seen. They’re refusing food to protest prisoners being held for
decades in solitary and to push for other changes to improve their basic
conditions.

California
Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard has tried to dismiss the strikers and
refuses to negotiate, but the media pressure is building through the strike. If
tens of thousands of us take action, we can help keep this issue in the
spotlight so that Secretary Beard can’t ignore the inhumane treatment of
prisoners.

Sign
the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term
solitary confinement.

Solitary
is such an extreme form of punishment that a United Nations torture rapporteur
called for an international ban on the practice except in rare occasions.
Here’s why:

The
majority of the 80,000 people held in solitary in this country are severely
mentally ill or because of a minor infraction (it’s a myth that it’s only for
violent prisoners)

Even
for people with stable mental health, solitary causes severe psychological
reactions, often leading people to attempt suicide

It
jeopardizes public safety because prisoners held in solitary have a harder time
reintegrating into society.

And
to add insult to injury, the hunger strikers are now facing retaliation – their
lawyers are being restricted from visiting and the strikers are being punished.
But the media continues to write about the hunger strike and we can help keep
the pressure on Secretary Beard by signing this petition.

Sign
the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term
solitary confinement.

Our
criminal justice system should keep communities safe and treat people fairly.
The use of solitary confinement undermines both of these goals – but little by
little, we can help put a stop to such cruelty.

Thank
you,

Anthony
for the ACLU Action team

P.S.
The hunger strikers have developed five core demands to address their basic
conditions, the main one being an end to long-term solitary confinement. They
are:

The
statement was read by Pfc. Bradley Manning at a providence inquiry for his
formal plea of guilty to one specification as charged and nine specifications
for lesser included offenses. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications.
This rush transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O'Brien at Thursday's
pretrial hearing and first appeared on Salon.com.

You
Have the Right to Remain Silent: NLG Guide to Law Enforcement Encounters

Posted
1 day ago on July 27, 2012, 10:28 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Occupy
Wall Street is a nonviolent movement for social and economic justice, but in
recent days disturbing reports have emerged of Occupy-affiliated activists
being targeted by US law enforcement, including agents from the FBI and
Department of Homeland Security. To help ensure Occupiers and allied activists
know their rights when encountering law enforcement, we are publishing in full
the National Lawyers Guild's booklet: You Have the Right to Remain Silent. The
NLG provides invaluable support to the Occupy movement and other activists –
please click here to support the NLG.

We
strongly encourage all Occupiers to read and share the information provided
below. We also recommend you enter the NLG's national hotline number
(888-654-3265) into your cellphone (if you have one) and keep a copy handy.
This information is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact the
NLG or a criminal defense attorney immediately if you have been visited by the
FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives,
friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are
contacted as well.

You
Have the Right to Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Law Enforcement
Encounters

What
Rights Do I Have?

Whether
or not you're a citizen, you have rights under the United States Constitution.
The Fifth Amendment gives every person the right to remain silent: not to
answer questions asked by a police officer or government agent. The Fourth
Amendment restricts the government's power to enter and search your home or
workplace, although there are many exceptions and new laws have expanded the
government's power to conduct surveillance. The First Amendment protects your
right to speak freely and to advocate for social change. However, if you are a
non-citizen, the Department of Homeland Security may target you based on your
political activities.

Standing
Up For Free Speech

The
government's crusade against politically-active individuals is intended to
disrupt and suppress the exercise of time-honored free speech activities, such
as boycotts, protests, grassroots organizing and solidarity work. Remember that
you have the right to stand up to the intimidation tactics of FBI agents and
other law enforcement officials who, with political motives, are targeting
organizing and free speech activities. Informed resistance to these tactics and
steadfast defense of your and others' rights can bring positive results. Each
person who takes a courageous stand makes future resistance to government oppression
easier for all. The National Lawyers Guild has a long tradition of standing up
to government repression. The organization itself was labeled a
"subversive" group during the McCarthy Era and was subject to FBI
surveillance and infiltration for many years. Guild attorneys have defended
FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement,
and the Puerto Rican independence movement. The NLG exposed FBI surveillance,
infiltration and disruption tactics that were detailed during the 1975-76
COINTELPRO hearings. In 1989 the NLG prevailed in a lawsuit on behalf of
several activist organizations, including the Guild, that forced the FBI to
expose the extent to which it had been spying on activist movements. Under the
settlement, the FBI turned over roughly 400,000 pages of its files on the
Guild, which are now available at the Tamiment Library at New York University.

What
if FBI Agents or Police Contact Me?

What
if an agent or police officer comes to the door?

Do
not invite the agents or police into your home. Do not answer any questions.
Tell the agent that you do not wish to talk with him or her. You can state that
your lawyer will contact them on your behalf. You can do this by stepping
outside and pulling the door behind you so that the interior of your home or
office is not visible, getting their contact information or business cards and
then returning inside. They should cease questioning after this. If the agent
or officer gives a reason for contacting you, take notes and give the
information to your attorney. Anything you say, no matter how seemingly
harmless or insignificant, may be used against you or others in the future.
Lying to or misleading a federal agent is a crime. The more you speak, the more
opportunity for federal law enforcement to find something you said (even if not
intentionally) false and assert that you lied to a federal officer.

Do
I have to answer questions?

You
have the constitutional right to remain silent. It is not a crime to refuse to
answer questions. You do not have to talk to anyone, even if you have been
arrested or are in jail. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that
you wish to remain silent and that you wish to consult an attorney. Once you
make the request to speak to a lawyer, do not say anything else. The Supreme
Court recently ruled that answering law enforcement questions may be taken as a
waiver of your right to remain silent, so it is important that you assert your
rights and maintain them. Only a judge can order you to answer questions. There
is one exception: some states have "stop and identify" statutes which
require you to provide identity information or your name if you have been
detained on reasonable suspicion that you may have committed a crime. A lawyer
in your state can advise you of the status of these requirements where you
reside.

Do
I have to give my name?

As
above, in some states you can be detained or arrested for merely refusing to
give your name. And in any state, police do not always follow the law, and
refusing to give your name may make them suspicious or more hostile and lead to
your arrest, even without just cause, so use your judgment. Giving a false name
could in some circumstances be a crime.

Do
I need a lawyer?

You
have the right to talk to a lawyer before you decide whether to answer
questions from law enforcement. It is a good idea to talk to a lawyer if you
are considering answering any questions. You have the right to have a lawyer
present during any interview. The lawyer's job is to protect your rights. Once
you tell the agent that you want to talk to a lawyer, he or she should stop
trying to question you and should make any further contact through your lawyer.
If you do not have a lawyer, you can still tell the officer you want to speak to
one before answering questions. Remember to get the name, agency and telephone
number of any investigator who visits you, and give that information to your
lawyer. The government does not have to provide you with a free lawyer unless
you are charged with a crime, but the NLG or another organization may be able
to help you find a lawyer for free or at a reduced rate.

If
I refuse to answer questions or say I want a lawyer, won't it seem like I have
something to hide?

Anything
you say to law enforcement can be used against you and others. You can never
tell how a seemingly harmless bit of information might be used or manipulated
to hurt you or someone else. That is why the right not to talk is a fundamental
right under the Constitution. Keep in mind that although law enforcement agents
are allowed to lie to you, lying to a government agent is a crime. Remaining
silent is not. The safest things to say are "I am going to remain
silent," "I want to speak to my lawyer," and "I do not consent
to a search." It is a common practice for law enforcement agents to try to
get you to waive your rights by telling you that if you have nothing to hide
you would talk or that talking would "just clear things up." The fact
is, if they are questioning you, they are looking to incriminate you or someone
you may know, or they are engaged in political intelligence gathering. You
should feel comfortable standing firm in protection and defense of your rights
and refusing to answer questions.

Can
agents search my home or office?

You
do not have to let police or agents into your home or office unless they have
and produce a valid search warrant. A search warrant is a written court order
that allows the police to conduct a specified search. Interfering with a
warrantless search probably will not stop it and you might get arrested. But
you should say "I do not consent to a search," and call a criminal
defense lawyer or the NLG. You should be aware that a roommate or guest can
legally consent to a search of your house if the police believe that person has
the authority to give consent, and your employer can consent to a search of
your workspace without your permission.

What
if agents have a search warrant?

If
you are present when agents come for the search, you can ask to see the
warrant. The warrant must specify in detail the places to be searched and the
people or things to be taken away. Tell the agents you do not consent to the
search so that they cannot go beyond what the warrant authorizes. Ask if you
are allowed to watch the search; if you are allowed to, you should. Take notes,
including names, badge numbers, what agency each officer is from, where they
searched and what they took. If others are present, have them act as witnesses
to watch carefully what is happening. If the agents ask you to give them
documents, your computer, or anything else, look to see if the item is listed
in the warrant. If it is not, do not consent to them taking it without talking
to a lawyer. You do not have to answer questions. Talk to a lawyer first.
(Note: If agents present an arrest warrant, they may only perform a cursory
visual search of the premises to see if the person named in the arrest warrant
is present.)

Do
I have to answer questions if I have been arrested?

No.
If you are arrested, you do not have to answer any questions. You should
affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to assert your right to
remain silent. Ask for a lawyer right away. Do not say anything else. Repeat to
every officer who tries to talk to or question you that you wish to remain
silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer. You should always talk to a
lawyer before you decide to answer any questions.

What
if I speak to government agents anyway?

Even
if you have already answered some questions, you can refuse to answer other
questions until you have a lawyer. If you find yourself talking, stop. Assert
that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer.

What
if the police stop me on the street?

Ask
if you are free to go. If the answer is yes, consider just walking away. If the
police say you are not under arrest, but are not free to go, then you are being
detained. The police can pat down the outside of your clothing if they have
reason to suspect you might be armed and dangerous. If they search any more
than this, say clearly, "I do not consent to a search." They may keep
searching anyway. If this happens, do not resist because you can be charged
with assault or resisting arrest. You do not have to answer any questions. You
do not have to open bags or any closed container. Tell the officers you do not
consent to a search of your bags or other property.

What
if police or agents stop me in my car?

Keep
your hands where the police can see them. If you are driving a vehicle, you
must show your license, registration and, in some states, proof of insurance.
You do not have to consent to a search. But the police may have legal grounds
to search your car anyway. Clearly state that you do not consent. Officers may
separate passengers and drivers from each other to question them, but no one
has to answer any questions.

What
if I am treated badly by the police or the FBI?

Write
down the officer's badge number, name or other identifying information. You
have a right to ask the officer for this information. Try to find witnesses and
their names and phone numbers. If you are injured, seek medical attention and
take pictures of the injuries as soon as you can. Call a lawyer as soon as
possible.

What
if the police or FBI threaten me with a grand jury subpoena if I don't answer
their questions?

A
grand jury subpoena is a written order for you to go to court and testify about
information you may have. It is common for the FBI to threaten you with a
subpoena to get you to talk to them. If they are going to subpoena you, they
will do so anyway. You should not volunteer to speak just because you are
threatened with a subpoena. You should consult a lawyer.

What
if I receive a grand jury subpoena?

Grand
jury proceedings are not the same as testifying at an open court trial. You are
not allowed to have a lawyer present (although one may wait in the hallway and
you may ask to consult with him or her after each question) and you may be asked
to answer questions about your activities and associations. Because of the
witness's limited rights in this situation, the government has frequently used
grand jury subpoenas to gather information about activists and political
organizations. It is common for the FBI to threaten activists with a subpoena
in order to elicit information about their political views and activities and
those of their associates. There are legal grounds for stopping
("quashing") subpoenas, and receiving one does not necessarily mean
that you are suspected of a crime. If you do receive a subpoena, call the NLG
National Hotline at 888-NLG-ECOL (888-654-3265) or call a criminal defense
attorney immediately.

The
government regularly uses grand jury subpoena power to investigate and seek
evidence related to politically-active individuals and social movements. This
practice is aimed at prosecuting activists and, through intimidation and
disruption, discouraging continued activism.

Federal
grand jury subpoenas are served in person. If you receive one, it is critically
important that you retain the services of an attorney, preferably one who
understands your goals and, if applicable, understands the nature of your
political work, and has experience with these issues. Most lawyers are trained
to provide the best legal defense for their client, often at the expense of
others. Beware lawyers who summarily advise you to cooperate with grand juries,
testify against friends, or cut off contact with your friends and political
activists. Cooperation usually leads to others being subpoenaed and
investigated. You also run the risk of being charged with perjury, a felony,
should you omit any pertinent information or should there be inconsistencies in
your testimony.

Frequently
prosecutors will offer "use immunity," meaning that the prosecutor is
prohibited from using your testimony or any leads from it to bring charges
against you. If a subsequent prosecution is brought, the prosecutor bears the
burden of proving that all of its evidence was obtained independent of the
immunized testimony. You should be aware, however, that they will use anything
you say to manipulate associates into sharing more information about you by
suggesting that you have betrayed confidences.

In
front of a grand jury you can "take the Fifth" (exercise your right
to remain silent). However, the prosecutor may impose immunity on you, which
strips you of Fifth Amendment protection and subjects you to the possibility of
being cited for contempt and jailed if you refuse to answer further. In front
of a grand jury you have no Sixth Amendment right to counsel, although you can
consult with a lawyer outside the grand jury room after each question.

What
if I don't cooperate with the grand jury?

If
you receive a grand jury subpoena and elect to not cooperate, you may be held
in civil contempt. There is a chance that you may be jailed or imprisoned for
the length of the grand jury in an effort to coerce you to cooperate. Regular
grand juries sit for a basic term of 18 months, which can be extended up to a
total of 24 months. It is lawful to hold you in order to coerce your
cooperation, but unlawful to hold you as a means of punishment. In rare
instances you may face criminal contempt charges.

What
If I Am Not a Citizen and the DHS Contacts Me?

The
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is now part of the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) and has been renamed and reorganized into: 1. The
Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS); 2. The Bureau of Customs
and Border Protection (CBP); and 3. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE). All three bureaus will be referred to as DHS for the
purposes of this pamphlet.

?
Assert your rights. If you do not demand your rights or if you sign papers
waiving your rights, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may deport you
before you see a lawyer or an immigration judge. Never sign anything without
reading, understanding and knowing the consequences of signing it.

?
Talk to a lawyer. If possible, carry with you the name and telephone number of
an immigration lawyer who will take your calls. The immigration laws are hard
to understand and there have been many recent changes. DHS will not explain
your options to you. As soon as you encounter a DHS agent, call your attorney.
If you can't do it right away, keep trying. Always talk to an immigration
lawyer before leaving the U.S. Even some legal permanent residents can be
barred from returning.

Based
on today's laws, regulations and DHS guidelines, non-citizens usually have the
following rights, no matter what their immigration status. This information may
change, so it is important to contact a lawyer. The following rights apply to
non-citizens who are inside the U.S. Non-citizens at the border who are trying
to enter the U.S. do not have all the same rights.

Do
I have the right to talk to a lawyer before answering any DHS questions or
signing any DHS papers?

Yes.
You have the right to call a lawyer or your family if you are detained, and you
have the right to be visited by a lawyer in detention. You have the right to
have your attorney with you at any hearing before an immigration judge. You do
not have the right to a government-appointed attorney for immigration
proceedings, but if you have been arrested, immigration officials must show you
a list of free or low cost legal service providers.

Should
I carry my green card or other immigration papers with me?

If
you have documents authorizing you to stay in the U.S., you must carry them
with you. Presenting false or expired papers to DHS may lead to deportation or
criminal prosecution. An unexpired green card, I-94, Employment Authorization
Card, Border Crossing Card or other papers that prove you are in legal status
will satisfy this requirement. If you do not carry these papers with you, you
could be charged with a crime. Always keep a copy of your immigration papers
with a trusted family member or friend who can fax them to you, if need be.
Check with your immigration lawyer about your specific case.

Am
I required to talk to government officers about my immigration history?

If
you are undocumented, out of status, a legal permanent resident (green card
holder), or a citizen, you do not have to answer any questions about your
immigration history. (You may want to consider giving your name; see above for
more information about this.) If you are not in any of these categories, and
you are being questioned by a DHS or FBI agent, then you may create problems
with your immigration status if you refuse to provide information requested by
the agent. If you have a lawyer, you can tell the agent that your lawyer will
answer questions on your behalf. If answering questions could lead the agent to
information that connects you with criminal activity, you should consider
refusing to talk to the agent at all.

If
I am arrested for immigration violations, do I have the right to a hearing
before an immigration judge to defend myself against deportation charges?

Yes.
In most cases only an immigration judge can order you deported. But if you
waive your rights or take "voluntary departure," agreeing to leave
the country, you could be deported without a hearing. If you have criminal
convictions, were arrested at the border, came to the U.S. through the visa
waiver program or have been ordered deported in the past, you could be deported
without a hearing. Contact a lawyer immediately to see if there is any relief
for you.

Can
I call my consulate if I am arrested?

Yes.
Non-citizens arrested in the U.S. have the right to call their consulate or to
have the police tell the consulate of your arrest. The police must let your
consulate visit or speak with you if consular officials decide to do so. Your
consulate might help you find a lawyer or offer other help. You also have the
right to refuse help from your consulate.

What
happens if I give up my right to a hearing or leave the U.S. before the hearing
is over?

You
could lose your eligibility for certain immigration benefits, and you could be
barred from returning to the U.S. for a number of years. You should always talk
to an immigration lawyer before you decide to give up your right to a hearing.

What
should I do if I want to contact DHS?

Always
talk to a lawyer before contacting DHS, even on the phone. Many DHS officers
view "enforcement" as their primary job and will not explain all of
your options to you.

What
Are My Rights at Airports?

IMPORTANT
NOTE: It is illegal for law enforcement to perform any stops, searches,
detentions or removals based solely on your race, national origin, religion,
sex or ethnicity.

If
I am entering the U.S. with valid travel papers can a U.S. customs agent stop
and search me?

Yes.
Customs agents have the right to stop, detain and search every person and item.

Can
my bags or I be searched after going through metal detectors with no problem or
after security sees that my bags do not contain a weapon?

Yes.
Even if the initial screen of your bags reveals nothing suspicious, the
screeners have the authority to conduct a further search of you or your bags.

If
I am on an airplane, can an airline employee interrogate me or ask me to get
off the plane?

The
pilot of an airplane has the right to refuse to fly a passenger if he or she
believes the passenger is a threat to the safety of the flight. The pilot's decision
must be reasonable and based on observations of you, not stereotypes.

What
If I Am Under 18?

Do
I have to answer questions?

No.
Minors too have the right to remain silent. You cannot be arrested for refusing
to talk to the police, probation officers, or school officials, except in some
states you may have to give your name if you have been detained.

What
if I am detained?

If
you are detained at a community detention facility or Juvenile Hall, you
normally must be released to a parent or guardian. If charges are filed against
you, in most states you are entitled to counsel (just like an adult) at no
cost.

Do
I have the right to express political views at school?

Public
school students generally have a First Amendment right to politically organize
at school by passing out leaflets, holding meetings, etc., as long as those
activities are not disruptive and do not violate legitimate school rules. You
may not be singled out based on your politics, ethnicity or religion.

Can
my backpack or locker be searched?

School
officials can search students' backpacks and lockers without a warrant if they
reasonably suspect that you are involved in criminal activity or carrying drugs
or weapons. Do not consent to the police or school officials searching your property,
but do not physically resist or you may face criminal charges.

Disclaimer

This
booklet is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact an attorney if
you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should
also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be
prepared if they are contacted as well.

The
following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's

work
since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown

on
Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l

Al-Awda
Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected

over
the past nine years.

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl

Support
Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!

Al-Awda,
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial

support
to carry out its work.

To
submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to

http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html

and
follow the simple instructions.

Thank
you for your generosity!

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D.
VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:

[Some
of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:

http://bauaw.blogspot.com/
or bauaw.org ...bw]

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Checkpoint - Jasiri X

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq6Y6LSjulU

Published on Jan 28, 2014

"Checkpoint" is based on the
oppression and discrimination Jasiri X witnessed firsthand during his
recent trip to Palestine and Israel "Checkpoint" is produced by Agent of
Change, and directed by Haute Muslim. Download "Checkpoint" at https://jasirix.bandcamp.com/track/ch.... Follow Jasiri X at https://twitter.com/jasiri_xLYRICSJournal of the hard times tales from the dark sideEvidence of the settlements on my hard driveMan I swear my heart died at the end of that car rideWhen I saw that checkpoint welcome to apartheidSoldiers wear military green at the checkpointAutomatic guns that's machine at the checkpointTavors not m16s at the checkpointFingers on the trigger you'll get leaned at the checkpointLittle children grown adults or teens at the checkpointAll ya papers better be clean at the checkpointYou gotta but your finger on the screen at the checkpointAnd pray that red light turns green at the check pointIf Martin Luther King had a dream of the checkpointHe wake with loud screams from the scenes at the checkpointIt's Malcolm X by any means at the check pointImagine if you daily routine was the checkpointSeparation walls that's surrounding the checkpointOn top is barbwire like a crown on the checkpointBetter have ya permits if your found at the checkpointGunmen on the tower aiming down at the checkpointThe idea is to keep you in fear of the checkpointYou enter through the cage in the rear of the checkpointIt feels like prison on a tier at the check pointI'd rather be anywhere but here at this checkpointNelson Mandela wasn't blind to the check pointHe stood for free Palestine not a check pointSupport BDS don't give a dime to the checkpointThis is international crime at the checkpointArabs get treated like dogs at the checkpointCause discrimination is the law at the checkpointCriminalized without a cause at the checkpointI'm just telling you what I saw at the checkpointSoldiers got bad attitudes at the checkpointCondescending and real rude at the checkpointDon't look em in they eyes when they move at the checkpointThey might strip a man or woman nude at the checkpointSoldiers might blow you out of ya shoes at the checkpointGas you up and then light the fuse at the checkpointEveryday you stand to be accused at the checkpointEach time your life you could lose at the checkpointIf Martin Luther King had a dream of the checkpointHe wake with loud screams from the scenes at the checkpointIt's Malcolm X by any means at the check pointImagine if you daily routine was the checkpointAt the airport in Tel Aviv is a checkpointThey pulled over our taxi at the checkpointPassport visa ID at the checkpointSoldiers going all through my things at the checkpointSaid I was high risk security at the checkpointBecause of the oppression I see at the checkpointOccupation in the 3rd degree at the checkpointAll a nigga wanna do is leave fuck a checkpoint

On
Gun Control, Martin Luther King, the Deacons of Defense and the history of
Black Liberation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzYKisvBN1o&feature=player_embedded

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Fukushima
Never Again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-Z4VLDGxU

"Fukushima,
Never Again" tells the story of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns in
north east Japan in March of 2011 and exposes the cover-up by Tepco and the
Japanese government.

This
is the first film that interviews the Mothers Of Fukushima, nuclear power
experts and trade unionists who are fighting for justice and the protection of
the children and the people of Japan and the world. The residents and citizens
were forced to buy their own geiger counters and radiation dosimeters in order
to test their communities to find out if they were in danger.

The
government said contaminated soil in children's school grounds was safe and
then

when
the people found out it was contaminated and removed the top soil, the
government and TEPCO refused to remove it from the school grounds.

It
also relays how the nuclear energy program for "peaceful atoms" was brought
to Japan under the auspices of the US military occupation and also the criminal
cover-up of the safety dangers of the plant by TEPCO and GE management which
built the plant in Fukushima. It also interviews Kei Sugaoka, the GE nulcear
plant inspector from the bay area who exposed cover-ups in the safety at the
Fukushima plant and was retaliated against by GE. This documentary allows the
voices of the people and workers to speak out about the reality of the disaster
and what this means not only for the people of Japan but the people of the
world as the US government and nuclear industry continue to push for more new
plants and government subsidies. This film breaks

the
information blockade story line of the corporate media in Japan, the US and
around the world that Fukushima is over.

Production
Of Labor Video Project

P.O.
Box 720027

San
Francisco, CA 94172

www.laborvideo.org

lvpsf@laborvideo.org

For
information on obtaining the video go to:

www.fukushimaneveragain.com

(415)282-1908

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1000
year of war through the world

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiG8neU4_bs&feature=share

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Anatomy
of a Massacre - Afganistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6BnRc11aug&feature=player_embedded

Afghans
accuse multiple soldiers of pre-meditated murder

To
see more go to http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures

Follow
us on Facebook (http://goo.gl/YRw42) or Twitter

(http://www.twitter.com/journeymanvod)

The
recent massacre of 17 civilians by a rogue US soldier has been shrouded in

mystery.
But through unprecedented access to those involved, this report

confronts
the accusations that Bales didn't act alone.

"They
came into my room and they killed my family". Stories like this are common

amongst
the survivors in Aklozai and Najiban. As are the shocking accusations

that
Sergeant Bales was not acting alone. Even President Karzai has announced

"one
man can not do that". Chief investigator, General Karimi, is suspicious

that
despite being fully armed, Bales freely left his base without raising

alarm.
"How come he leaves at night and nobody is aware? Every time we have

weapon
accountability and personal accountability." These are just a few of the

questions
the American army and government are yet to answer. One thing however

is
very clear, the massacre has unleashed a wave of grief and outrage which

means
relations in Kandahar will be tense for years to come: "If I could lay my

hands
on those infidels, I would rip them apart with my bare hands."

A
Film By SBS

Distributed
By Journeyman Pictures

April
2012

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Photo
of George Zimmerman, in 2005 photo, left, and in a more recent photo.